Cyberattack Hobbles Baltimore

[DrHenley]

Cyberattack Hobbles Baltimore for Two Weeks and Counting
https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-we...d-11558431002?mod=searchresults&page=3&pos=20

BALTIMORE—About 10,000 city government computers here remain frozen two weeks after a disruptive cyberattack that has delayed home sales and halted water bills.

Baltimore was hit May 7 by hackers demanding an undisclosed sum to unlock computers. The city hasn’t paid, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing the incident. Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young has warned it could take months to recover some systems.

 

[Brent S]

Cyberattack Hobbles Baltimore for Two Weeks and Counting
https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-we...d-11558431002?mod=searchresults&page=3&pos=20

Scary stuff. Unfortunately I believe it will become more and more common. What I don’t understand is why don’t govt and hospitals and such have some kind of backup system? I’m not good with IT work but if all the days information was backed up to a separate system wouldn’t that protect it?

 

[DrHenley]

What I don’t understand is why don’t govt and hospitals and such have some kind of backup system? I’m not good with IT work but if all the days information was backed up to a separate system wouldn’t that protect it?

I'm sure they do, but I can tell you as a former IT director, it's impossible to explain to the muckity mucks in administration why you need money for things like developing and testing recovery plans. They just assume any "computer guy" will know what to do if something goes bump in the night. It's especially bad in municipal government where you have political types making all the decisions.

So they probably DO have backups, but recovering from one of these types of attacks is a lot more complicated than just restoring from backup (which itself is not as easy as people think in a worst case scenario, which a ransomware attack IS)

We had a ransomware attack, and I only had to take the whole system down for about three hours to fix it. But I had intimate knowledge of our systems (because I designed them) and what needed to be fixed, plus decades of hands on experience. Municipal governments often outsource their IT to kids still wet behind the ears. I know this because two of my former employees worked as independent "computer guys" for municipal governments, one before, and the other after working for me, and I can tell you they would not have a friggin' clue how to recover from a ransomware attack. It is WAAAAAAY above their pay grade.