LaPorte County has reportedly bowed to cybercriminals demands and has paid over $130,000 after they infected its systems with a piece of ransomware that crippled its network services.
The attack on LaPorte County which is in the US state of Indiana, is said to be have occurred on July 6. Though it was confined by the county's IT department to less than 7% of the organization's laptops, the ransomware managed to get to two domain controllers and blocked servers from accessing the network services.
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According to local news outlet, WSBT, officials decided to pay the 10.5 bitcoin ransom after the FBI failed to recover the data that were encrypted by the ransomware.
Report says the ransomware involved in the attack is called Ryuk, a deadly ransomware that is said to have also been used in the attack on Jackson County in Georgia. Jackson eventually paid the criminals $400,000 ransom to free its systems.
Recently, the United States Conference of Mayors said that its members which number over 1,400 had pledged not to give in to ransomware demands. Now, LaPorte and Michigan which are the two biggest cities in LaPorte County, are also members of the organization.
LaPorte County isn't the only one to have fallen victim to cybcercriminal and their ransomware attacks. West Haven in Connecticut paid $2,000 to cybercriminals.
In Florida, Riviera Reach paid $600,000 while Lake City paid $460,000. While other cities were able to recover their files from their systems, Lake City couldn't recover all of its files despite paying the ransom.
As for LaPorte County, insurance is said to recover $100,000 of the $130,000 ransom.