When Atlanta was hit by a devastating ransomware attack in March 2018, it knocked almost all of the city’s agencies offline, impacting everything from scheduling court cases to paying utility bills online and causing decades worth of official correspondence to disappear.
The incident was headline news, and the recovery cost to the city was estimated to be $17 million. (A Department of Justice probe into the cyberattack resulted in indictments of two Iranian hackers.) Security experts warned that Atlanta should be a wake-up call for how vulnerable local and state governments were to these types of attack — and how underprepared they are to combat them.
So far, it seems like no one has gotten the message.
Just over 12 months later, Baltimore is in the throes of its own costly ransomware attack. Now in its sixth week, the attack has left officials unable to process payments and even respond to emails. And Baltimore is hardly alone: In just the last two months, there have been ransomware attacks in Greenville, North Carolina; Imperial County, California; Stuart, Florida; Cleveland, Ohio; Augusta, Maine; Lynn, Massachusetts; and cities under attack ransomware going worse
