The City of Independence, Missouri, was hit by a ransomware attack last week that is still affecting its services. The ransomware attack forced the city to shut down system so it could repair the damage and recover as quickly as possible.
City Manager Zach Walker said in a statement: "The City of Independence recently experienced an incident that caused technical difficulties and disruptions to multiple services. It appears that these outages are the result of a ransomware attack that was discovered and stopped before it could infect the entire city network."
Walker also noted that he is performing a full system scan and restoring encrypted machines from available backups. The recovery process is causing further disruption to city services, including utility bill delivery and online payments.
Walker told Kansas City's KSHB : "In order to protect the integrity of our systems, when we began to observe some malicious activity, we took all of our systems offline. One of the systems that was compromised was the utility billing system." Due to the problems caused to its systems, the Missouri city will not impose additional late payment fees .
Walker noted that investigations are currently underway to determine whether the attackers stole city data , including personal information of residents and employees, in the ransomware attack
As is well known, most gangs steal unencrypted files before deploying ransomware. They then use the stolen files in double-blackmail strategies, in which they threaten victims with leaking their files to a data leak site if they don't pay the ransom .Hackers from various ransomware gangs have told BleepingComputer that victims are more concerned about leaking stolen data than losing encrypted files.
Finally, it is worth noting that no ransomware gang has so far claimed responsibility for the attack in question.
