The Davidson County’s Manager Zeb Hanner has released a public statement saying that the county’s computer systems were under the influence of a ransomware attack and could take weeks or months to full recovery. And as per the sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the attack took place on early hours of Friday last week and the officials realized about the attack in the evening on the same day.
An emergency meeting was held at 2 pm on Friday by the Board of Commissioners of Davidson County and the officials discovered that the county’s database was compromised by Samas Ransomware.
Around 70 servers and an unknown number of desktops and laptops were impacted by the virus and the malware has also made the phone and other communications systems non-operational since then.
Hanner notified to the media that though the files were encrypted, no data was stolen. He added that the hackers are demanding around 13 Bitcoins as a ransom to decrypt the files and have given 7 days of time to pay the ransom.
However, the officials of the Davidson County are not willing to pay the ransom and have contacted law enforcement on this issue.
FBI is said to arrive at the county on Tuesday afternoon and has decided to carry out a separate investigation on this issue.
In the meantime, the authorities of Davidson County have contacted a cybersecurity firm to get an advice on how to proceed. They also claim to have a cyber insurance which can prove financially handy in such situations.
Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to make a note of the fact that a similar situation was witnessed at Mecklenburg County in December last year, where all the computer systems in the county were compromised by ransomware. Later the officials of the County negotiated the ransom pay with the hackers and paid them $23k in exchange for the decryption key.
So, will Davidson County officials follow the same….?
Well, only time can provide an apt answer to the above-said question.
