News is out that a ransomware attack took place on the North Miami Beach Police department locking down the entire computer network of the law enforcement agency. However, officials have assured that no personal information was compromised in the incident and there will be no interruption to public safety services due to the cyber incident.
According to a source from the Miami Beach Police department, the hackers are demanding a ransom worth millions in exchange for the decryption key. But the authorities are not in a mood to bow down to the demands of the hackers in this regard, as they are thinking to use data backups to recover the encrypted data.
FBI, the US Secret Service, and Miami Dade Police Department have started investigating the incident along with a third-party forensic investigator from Texas.
Meanwhile, a source from Florida’s County election office stated that the database of the election office was hit by ransomware in Sept’2019 before the presidential elections of the same year. And for reasons, the incident wasn’t’ reported to the media.
Wendy Sartory Link who is working currently as the election supervisor for Palm Beach County was the source that leaked the above-stated information to the media- first reported by Palm Beach Post.
Ms. Link stated that her team found out the details of the malware attack recently when they were interviewing a few probables for the post of the county’s IT director as the previous one was sacked due to allegation that he was holding Child P0$n. They also discovered that the ransomware attack was never revealed to the public; whereas such ransomware infections should be relayed to the media and public as soon as they occur.
Whether the attack was launched by Russian hackers on the Florida County elections of 2016 is yet to be probed.
