Ransomware: is your data really safe?

The cloud is magic and it made the servers disappeared!  We don’t have to worry anymore with backups and failing hard drives. But it is just an illusion. The servers are still there in a data center, and it’s physically out of your hands. We don’t see them, we don’t have to worry about them or the security of the information on them, until we do. 

On March 22nd 2018 the city of Atlanta experienced a ransomware cyber attack and city officials received a written demand for bitcoins.

Residents couldn’t pay their water bill or their parking tickets. Police and other employees had to to write out their reports by hand. And court proceedings for people who were not in police custody were canceled. Law enforcement, including the FBI, Homeland Security and the Secret Service, as well as independent forensics experts and educational partners like Georgia Tech, were involved in an investigation to determine exactly what happened.

The City of Atlanta spent more than $2.6 million to recover while the attackers asked for a ransom of roughly $50,000 worth of bitcoin. 

Atlanta officials haven’t said whether they paid the ransom but the Atlanta Department of Procurement lists eight emergency contracts initiated between March 22nd and April 2nd with a total value of $2,667,328. The bulk of the expenditures relate to Cloud infrastructure expertise, presumably all the systems that the hackers encrypted.

There are cases in the private sector of relatively small companies with $60 million in revenue, that had paid about $3.1 million after a ransomware attack, because they had all the incident response, plus insurance claims, privacy monitoring, and contractual hits for missed services.

Atlanta’s ransomware attack affected five departments, and disrupted many functions including the Police Department records system, infrastructure maintenance requests, and the judicial system. The attack also hindered revenue collection.

There are seamless integrations with all operating systems, folders in our computers that are in fact backup and synchronized facilitating the group cooperation, allowing better and more efficient development of any kind of projects, but there is a big problem: security! 

Backups and network segmentation now can pay off later if targeted by ransomware.