In the early morning hours of January 10, the Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments in Essex was hit with a ransomware attack that left their files encrypted with a demand to pay a foreign attacker. The agency’s work was “severely impeded,” according to Executive Director Sam Gold, because computers left on at the time were rendered inoperable and staff access to email was lost.
Gold said that his agency does not currently have an estimate on the total costs of the attack, but said he “would not be surprised if the ultimate costs are close to $100,000” after counting the damage and time that staff spent making repairs.
“When you pay a ransom the hackers do not just turn on your system,” Gold said. “They provide you a key that IT professionals use to decrypt your files. This key does not come with instructions and takes a lot of time. Copies of all the encrypted files must be made, to ensure that if there is a problem with decryption you can go back. Once the decryption was completed and we recovered the vast majority of our files and email, everything was reset and installed new on new hard drives.”
Gold said…
