It’s been a fortnight since Baltimore city servers have experienced a ransomware attack and as a result of which all IT services including internal email systems and online payment systems have been suspended by the city officials.
In order to stay in touch with each other, the officials created new Gmail accounts for correspondence on May 9th of this year. But as the accounts were created in bulk from the same network, Google’s servers suspended all those accounts after two days of their creation as they suspected them as spammers.
Today news is out that after a review of 5 days, the Alphabet Inc’s subsidiary decided to restore access to those Gmail accounts as it came to know who created them and why?
Coming to the news on disruption, Baltimore is reported to be still suffering a lot from malware attack. The whole administration services have been blocked till date, people still cannot pay their tax bills & parking fines and the sale of houses were put on hold.
The cybercriminals who launched that attack on May 7th of this year are reported to be demanding a payment of $100,000 in Bitcoins to restore the entire disrupted systems.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that over 10,000 servers of Baltimore city services were infected by the Robinhood ransomware and City Mayor Bernard Young has confirmed the news.
FBI and Secret services were pressed into service to investigate the incident as the authorities have refused to pay the demanded amount by the hackers.
