City leaders in Riviera Beach, Fl., met this week for an extraordinary vote to pay nearly $600,000 in ransom to hackers who paralyzed the city’s computer systems, reports the New York Times. Riviera Beach, a city of about 35,000 people north of West Palm Beach, became the latest government to be crippled by ransomware attacks that have successfully extorted municipalities and forced them to dig into public coffers to restore their networks. A similar breach cost Baltimore $18 million to repair damages. Large cities have had to pay smaller ransoms than Riviera Beach. On Monday, the City Council unanimously agreed to have its insurance carrier pay hackers 65 Bitcoin, a hard-to-trace digital currency, amounting to about $592,000. The City Council hopes to regain access to data encrypted in the cyberattack three weeks ago, though there is no guarantee the hackers will release the data once payment is received.
Rose Anne Brown, a spokeswoman, said Riviera Beach was working with law enforcement, which does not typically endorse making ransom payments, and with security consultants. The large ransom demanded from Riviera Beach suggests hackers have become emboldened by their increasingly sophisticated ability to target government agencies, said Jason Rebholz of Moxfive, a technology firm, who tracks ransomware payments and has helped victims of similar attacks. “The complexity and severity of these ransomware attacks just continues to increase,” he said. “The sophistication of these threat actors is increasing faster than many organizations and cities are able to keep pace with.” Costs to rebuild computer systems are usually far higher than the ransom. Atlanta estimated that recovering from a sustained attack that debilitated the city last year could cost $17 million. The Riviera Beach attack began May 29 after a police department employee opened an infected email attachment.