By Erik Briceno
In the course of a single week, three cities in Florida were struck with three separate ransomware attacks. At the time of writing this, two of the three gave in to the ransom demands and the third is still considering it. Almost immediately following these incidents in Florida, Georgia’s state court system was also hit. This was the second time this year for Georgia, following an event which completely crippled Atlanta’s IT network. Officials paid off the attackers with a hefty $400,000 ransom payment, and it is currently unknown if Georgia will be paying the ransom again this time.
Each of these attacks and capitulations have occurred within a worrisome and remarkably short period of time. It’s also worth noting that all of these events take place merely weeks after the announcement of a ransomware attack on Baltimore — an attack that cost the city $18.2 million to recover from. Here is a breakdown of each one as they happened. Read more