In early May, the city of Baltimore was struck by a ransomware attack that completely crippled the city’s computer networks and online services. Five weeks after the attack, the city was only able to restore one third of employees’ emailsand the city’s billing system for water services was still offline. By July, email access for employees was finally restored, according to the Baltimore Sun, but the city’s email archive was still not accessible. Experts estimate that the Baltimore ransomware attack will cost the city approximately $18 million to restore all systems, yet the perpetrators of the attack demanded just $80,000 in cryptocurrency.  

While Baltimore continues to make headlines, smaller cities and government agencies are also generating news about ransomware attacks. Three additional cities in Florida have been attacked and two of them — Lake City and Riviera Beach — agreed to pay the ransom, ranging from U.S. $500,000 to $600,000. 

There have been at least 24 U.S. municipalities that have fallen victim to ransomware attacks in the first half of 2019 alone. By comparison, ransomware attacks affected 54 city and municipal government agencies in 2018. The number of ransomware attacks this year will likely surpass last year’s and criminals will continue to target smaller local and regional governments, many of which tend to run outdated or unpatched systems, making their systems more vulnerable to cyberattacks, and have limited resources to defend against such attacks, which are only expected to get more sophisticated, more frequent and will continue to make headlines.

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