The Village of Key Biscayne reported a data breach earlier this week, becoming the third Florida city to suffer this type of cyber attack, according to cbslocal.com.
Computer hackers attacked the Key Biscayne database just one week after the City of Riviera Beach decided to pay $ 600,000 to rescue their information from hackers.
Another town in Florida that was forced to pay a ransom was Lake City, its administrator paid about 460 thousand dollars in bitcoin so hacker would return the data from the computer last Tuesday.
Lake City, located west of Jacksonville, became the second city in Florida to pay cybercriminals.
Lake City
In the case of Lake City, it was attacked by a malware called “Triple Threat”, which when activated, stops the telephones and the network systems. Despite the fact that public safety departments were not affected, technological aggression damaged emails and public services such as customer service, the secretary’s office and the city’s administrative departments.
Researchers are still finding out how this situation occurred.
When asked about the reason they decided to pay the ransom, Lake City administrator Joseph Helfenberg said paying was the cheapest option since the city is paying a $ 10,000 deductible and the rest was placed by his insurer. .
The administrator of Lake City assured that they tried to recover the information in diverse occasions but in all the cases they failed.
Key Biscayne
In the case of Key Biscayne – which is a small town – the municipal administrator, Andrea Agha reported that officials discovered that there was a security problem with the data on Monday. He added that “Key Biscayne is working with outside consultants and external forensic experts to ensure that their systems are secure and to determine the scope of the event.”
Agha has not made further comments about it.
Riviera Beach
The first city attacked was Riviera Beach, apparently the malware entered the system when an employee clicked on a link in an email they sent him. Because they could not recover the data, they decided to pay the hakers to return the information, just as the authorities of Key Biscayne said that it was cheaper to pay offenders than to reinstate the system.
When the FBI in the city of Miami was consulted about whether it was conducting an investigation into these hacking events that had occurred in the three cities of Florida, the Federal Bureau of Investigation neither denied nor confirmed the question.
