Cyber Crime

Pottawatomie County paid the ransom to recover its systems

Pottawatomie County restored operations that were suspended after a ransomware attack hit its systems on September 17, 2021.

Officials at Pottawatomie County announced to have fully recovered their IT infrastructure that was hit by a ransomware attack on September 17, 2021.

County Administrator Chad Kinsley announced that the county opted to pay the ransomware, they revealed that they have paid less than 10% of the ransomware initially demanded by the ransomware operators.

Kinsley did not reveal how much the Pottawatomie County paid, but WIBW-TV has filed an open record request to determine the ransom paid by the county.

“We are a small county with small resources,” declared Kinsley. “With the extraordinary demands that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on local governments like ours, we wanted to make sure that the hackers understood that there was no way we could even come close to meeting their demand,” he said. “We were focused on protecting taxpayers and doing everything we could to resolve the issue with as little as possible. We believe we succeeded at that.”

County experts are investigating the security breach with the help of law enforcement.

IT staff at the County has taken further security measures to improve its resilience and prevent similar security breaches in the future.

At the time of this writing, most county offices recovered their operations, anyway, it will take additional time to fully restore some services. The County IT personnel is working to recover all the impacted machines.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook

[adrotate banner=”9″][adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

Cisco warns of password-spraying attacks targeting Secure Firewall devices

Cisco warns customers of password-spraying attacks that have been targeting Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) services…

2 hours ago

American fast-fashion firm Hot Topic hit by credential stuffing attacks

Hot Topic suffered credential stuffing attacks that exposed customers' personal information and partial payment data.…

6 hours ago

Cisco addressed high-severity flaws in IOS and IOS XE software

Cisco addressed multiple vulnerabilities in IOS and IOS XE software that can be exploited to…

20 hours ago

Google: China dominates government exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant reported a surge in the number of actively…

1 day ago

Google addressed 2 Chrome zero-days demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2024

Google addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser that have been demonstrated during…

2 days ago

INC Ransom stole 3TB of data from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland

The INC Ransom extortion group hacked the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland and is threatening…

2 days ago

This website uses cookies.