City of Stratford which happens to be an urban town from Ontario, Canada was in news in April this year for a ransomware attack. The staff of the town located on the banks of the Avon River said that their servers were all encrypted with a malware which hit the network on April 14th, 2019.
Highly Placed sources reported at that time that the hacker/s managed to install malware on six of the servers on a physical note which also encrypted two virtual servers locking down access to sensitive data which was hard to recover.
Despite warning from the law enforcement, the city’s IT staff chose to pay the hackers a $10 BTC payment which at that time accounted to $71,091 @ USD 7109 for each BTC.
The IT staff now released a media update saying that they were helpless as the security company they approached which happens to be Deloitte Canada was not in a position to help them recover data and were only investigating the anomalies, malicious activity or any unauthorized access related to the incident.
As they were not left with any other option, the city began to negotiate with the attacker on April 17th and handed over the said amount on April 20th which yielded them a decryption key on April 25th of this year.
Kevvie Fowler, the Global Incident Response in-charge of the auditing firm confirmed that no data was compromised in the ransomware incident as no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data was either accessed or transmitted to any other remote server in the world.
As Stratford city had a cyber insurance cover with a deductible of $15,000 the ransom paid to hackers is reported to get covered in this financial year.
