In March 2018, a SamSam virus attack crippled the city of Atlanta, and the perpetrators demanded a $51,000 ransom.
This high-profile attack caused the closure of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and took down at least one-third of the 424 software programs used by the City of Atlanta. The city refused to pay the ransom, and the recovery price tag is now “somewhere in the range of $21 million” according to Taylor Amerding of Forbes.
A ransomware attack of this magnitude should serve as a wake-up call for every government organization – state, federal or municipal. However, the attacks keep coming.