The municipal council of Riviera Beach, Florida agreed this week to pay more than $600,000 to the operators of a ransomware, in order to recover data that had been encrypted three weeks ago.
The city council's decision, reported , came after officials concluded there was no other way to recover the city's records.
It should be noted that the city also paid $941,000 for new computers.
Riviera City data has been inaccessible since May 29, 2019, when a Riviera Beach police officer opened an email containing ransomware. The malware infected the city's network.
The ransomware locked the files in all city services. Everything stopped working, except for 911 services, which continued to operate, but in a limited capacity.
The city's website, the mail server, the account issuance system and everything else stopped functioning, and communications were done only by phone.
The city employees held an initial meeting on June 3, when they decided to allocate $941,000 for 310 new desktop computers and 90 laptops, so the city can have a proper infrastructure again after the incident.
Initially they did not intend to pay the ransom but in the last weeks they realized they were unable to recover the encrypted data.
On Monday they unanimously decided to pay 65 bitcoins (about $603,000) for the ransom.
The vote lasted only two minutes, according to the local Palm Beach Post.
Riviera Beach is a suburb north of Palm Beach in Florida. Last year, another suburb of Palm Beach – Palm Springs – also paid ransom to a ransomware, but lost two years of data.
However, Riviera City is not the victim that paid the most ransom. That honor is held by a South Korean web hosting company, Nayana, which paid $1.14 million in bitcoins after a ransomware attack in June 2017.
