Atlanta Projected To Spend At Least $2.6 Million on Ransomware Recovery (zdnet.com)

Atlanta is setting aside more than $2.6 million on recovery efforts stemming from a ransomware attack, which crippled a sizable part of the city's online services. ZDNet reports: The city was hit by the notorious SamSam ransomware, which exploits a deserialization vulnerability in Java-based servers. The ransom was set at around $55,000 worth of bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that in recent weeks has wildy fluctated in price. But the ransom was never paid, said Atlanta city spokesperson Michael Smith in an email. Between the ransomware attack and the deadline to pay, the payment portal was pulled offline by the ransomware attacker. According to newly published emergency procurement figures, the city is projected to spend as much as 50 times that amount in response to the cyberattack. Between March 22 and April 2, the city budgeted $2,667,328 in incident response, recovery, and crisis management.

Comments

Re:Ouch

[bartle]

A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom. The decryption process can be applied to all machines simultaneously, bringing them back online in perhaps a few hours. Alternatively, a thorough restore from tapes fetched from Iron Mountain could take a week or two.

Restoring from backup is a great solution for individuals, but large networks are unlikely to have a backup solution that can scale as well as a ransomware worm can. For large organizations, their money is best spent on preventing infection in the first place and mitigating it when it does occur.

Re:Good to hear it works.

[afidel]

backups are not about the fact if you take backups, but how fast you restore WHEN you need to.

Amen to that, at job[-1] we had no problem hitting our backup windows but when we did a restore for a discovery request we found out that the interleving that allowed the tape drives to fly during backups made restores crawl to the point where our 48 hour and 72 hour SLAs were a joke. That led us to a disk to disk to tape solution which could restore files in minutes from the appliance and where if we had to reseed from tapes the restores were done to the appliance as one long streaming block which went at full LTO speeds. Best of all for critical systems the appliances even included the ability to act as an iSCSI target for the VMWare hosts so you could restore in place if the storage arrays blew up and you needed to get critical systems up an running ASAP.