A ransomware attack which took place on or before January 9th of this year on ‘Salisbury Police Department (SPD)’ is said to have locked down access to emails and data related to recent arrests says a press report released on Wednesday by the law enforcement agency.
High placed sources say that the attack was a ransomware variant that locks down data from access until a ransom is paid in exchange to the decryption key.
Bill Garrett, the Director of IT for the city has confirmed the news and said that the access got blocked from 6 am on January 9th, 2019.
Sources from the police department say that the officials tried their best to negotiate a deal with the hackers in exchange for the data access. However, things did not fall into place and so the authorities chose to look into other alternatives.
If history is taken into account, the Salisbury Police Agency witnessed three cyber attacks in the last 5 years. However, they took appropriate steps to identify and stop the network damage in time.
But the recent ransomware attack is of a different genre and is tagged to be the worst network attack in the record of SPD.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that the impact of the recent malware attack is being witnessed on the records management system, email network, and the central server. However, the damage might not be as expected as the database is having an intricate backup system which offers superior business continuity.
SPD says that no data was stolen or downloaded during the event and recovery of the digital assets and a review of the cybersecurity defenses has been initiated to a third party.
