Baltimore 's government has been hit by a ransomware attack, and is struggling to restore its systems that were almost completely locked down. And as if that weren't enough, another problem has arisen as Google has blocked parts of the city from using their Gmail accounts .
On May 7, 2019, a ransomware Baltimore’s government systems, including emails. The malicious actors who installed the ransomware then demanded a sum of money from the city in order to stop the attack. After a few weeks, the city appeared to be recovering from the entire attack, which appeared to have targeted the water bill payment system and other similar services. While officials are doing their best to handle the issue, which would actually take months to resolve, there are many who have chosen to create Gmail accounts to stay operational.
Gmail now separates personal accounts from accounts used by businesses and other organizations, requiring the latter to pay for its service. Google's systems reportedly required city officials to close their temporary accounts, while email accounts for the city's health department, councilors and the mayor's office were rejected.
A Google spokesperson said that Gmail's security system detected the creation of multiple accounts in a short period of time and had no choice but to immediately disable them.
“These accounts were disabled because creating a large number of new accounts triggered Google’s automated security system. The limit is around 50 accounts, so creating more triggered its systems.”
“We have restored access to Gmail accounts for Baltimore City officials. Our automated security systems disabled the accounts due to the mass creation of multiple Gmail accounts from the same network.”
It's worth noting that the issue Baltimore faced could have been avoided if only a government Google GSuite account had been created, or even a regular GSuite, at a cost of $6 per user per month.
Organizations can learn from this experience by upgrading their accounts or creating a GSuite account to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future.
