Atlanta Reels From SamSam Ransomware Attack; Files Still Locked as City Government Resorts to Paper and Cellphones
The Atlanta City government is making the best they can out of last week's situation when a cyber attack hit vital digital and online systems with a wave of ransomware infections that locked away important files and records. City workers are now conducting transactions by phone, and in some cases, have gone back to good old-fashioned paper.
About nine days after the crippling cyber attacks, city officials in Atlanta have been working through the Easter and Passover holidays to get the city's services back on its feet. Computers and laptops provided by the city offices have been compromised and are not to be trusted, hence city staffers have in some cases brought in their own personal PCs and are sharing them around just to get work done, according to Reuters.
City Councilman Howard Shook, whose office was among those that were worst-hit by the cyber attacks, recapped the past weekend's efforts very well.
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"It's extraordinarily frustrating," Shook said. His office lost around 16 years' worth of digital records, due to the Samsam ransomware that encrypted computer files in the workstations it managed to infect.
Atlanta residents over the past week could not pay their water bills, and the Atlanta Police Department has reverted to printing and filing paper reports to remain operational. With online systems crippled by the attack, daily operations in five local government departments in Atlanta has been severely disrupted, as Wired reports.
"It's important to understand that our overall operations have been significantly impacted and it will take some time to work through and rebuild our systems and infrastructure," a representative for the city explained in a statement on Thursday, March 29.
The Samsam ransomware that has spread across Atlanta's vital city networks have been around for some time, having been first spotted in 2015. Ransomware code is notorious for spreading quickly through compromised email links and websites, and once a computer is infected, the malware will encrypt the files on the hard drive before putting up a notice asking for a ransom, to be paid in anonymous cryptocurrency in most cases, hence the name.
The perpetrators that often deploy SamSam has been known to target specific institutions and systems, especially those that they think will rather pay the ransom than risk service disruptions. Local government offices, universities, industries and hospitals are common targets, and in Atlanta's case, the ransom was set at $51,000, to be paid in bitcoin.
"Everything on my hard drive is gone," City Auditor Amanda Noble said, noting that eight of the 18 computers they have in the auditing office has been locked down by the virus, her own machine included.
City workers and the Atlanta police have resorted to pen and paper in some cases, as they continue to wait for the restoration of critical online systems that the city has become dependent on.
"Our data management teams are working diligently to restore normal operations and functionalities to these systems and hope to be back online in the very near future," Atlanta police spokesman Carlos Campos said, adding that by Easter Sunday, police officers were able to start using digital reports again.
