1.) Paying a ransom to hackers seems to be picking up as a trend these days as another city from Florida is alleged to have bowed down to the demands of hackers on a recent note. On Tuesday this week, the news was out that the Lake City of Florida has paid hackers up to $460,000 in Bitcoins to free-up its database from file-encrypting malware.
And the news comes just days after Riviera beach of Florida has made it official that it has paid to hackers $600,000 in digital currency to recover from a ransomware attack.
What’s interesting in this fact is that the latest media revelations have made the private matter public, paving the way or encouraging more such victims to bow down to the demands of hackers.
Note 1- FYI, there is no guarantee that such payments will always help you in freeing up your database from ransomware attacks.
2.) European Union shortly known as EU is all set to conduct war games in order to prepare its nations IT Infrastructure from cyber attacks emerging out from Russia and China.
As a series of recent incidents on the UK have alarmed the governments, Pekka Haavisto, the foreign minister of Finland has decided to react first on behalf of the 28 member states. So, his nation has decided to conduct cyber war games in order to prepare themselves for such attacks on critical infrastructure.
Finland took the decision after conducting a detailed inquiry on the incident which occurred in last October where Russia blocked the GPS signals of Finnish military during its participation in NATO Military Exercises in Norway.
Note 2- Kremlin was found guilty in blocking the GPS signals of Finnish Military and was also found to be involved in a cyber attack on International Chemical Weapons Watchdog which was later foiled by Dutch Military Intelligence.
3) Baltimore city which was digitally immobilized due to a ransomware attack has decided to approve an additional $10 million grant in excess to cover the financial loss incurred due to the incident which happened almost two months ago.
As the attack moved into its 8th week, the fund was sanctioned out of emergency to technologically recover from the hack.
As systems such as water billing and real estate dealings went offline due to the impact from cyber attack the city needed monetary help to replace the systems.
So, the fund was much needed to recover from the loss of $18 million from the hack.
