Officials of the Ohio city have confirmed last week’s media reports stating a ransomware attack on the city’s digital assets which includes the disruption and closure of 311 call center helpline for a few days.
Akron which is a scenic city in Ohio is battling with erratic weather from the past few days. Adding to the misery, an anonymous hacking group is said to have targeted the city’s digital database halting essential services to be delivered to the populace suffering from a snowstorm.
Mayor Dan Horrigan said that the city learned of the attack on Tuesday last week and after a preliminary probe realized that the attack was launched on critical hardware and software systems.
Around 8 members from the Ohio National Guard’s team have been pressed into service to assist FBI in investigating the incident and a third party IT services provider has been hired to help recover the digital assets as quickly as possible.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that the cybercrooks behind the attack are demanding thousands of dollars as ransom to free up the database from the malware. However, the officials are not in a position to oblige the demands of the hackers and so are reportedly looking for alternatives.
Meanwhile, Anonymous hacking group has denied issued a statement through its official Twitter handle that its team was not responsible for the attack as reported by Akron city’s digital news resource ‘Akron Beacon Journal’. A person claiming to be the founder and member of the ‘Anonymous’ Jacking group said that their group doesn’t conduct attacks for monetary gains and so the perpetrators could have been propagating on the web with different objectives.
Just a few hours ago, an individual connected to Anonymous said that a renegade hacker could have launched the attack as the city failed to patch up the computer systems after previous attacks and was still using obsolete software.
