City of Lafayette (Colorado, USA) paid $45,000 ransom after ransowmare attack

The City of Lafayette, Colorado, USA, has been forced to pay $45,000 because they were unable to restore necessary files from backup.

On July 27th, the systems at the City of Lafayette, Colorado, were infected with ransomware, the malicious code impacted phone services, email, and online payment reservation systems.

The City did not immediately disclose the cause of the outage of its systems and invited the citizens to use 911 or an alternate number for emergency services.

Now the City of Lafayette admitted they were a victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted its systems and confirmed that opted to pay a $45,000 ransom to receive a decryption tool to recover its files.

“After a thorough examination of the situation and cost scenarios, and considering the potential for lengthy inconvenient service outages for residents, we determined that obtaining the decryption tool far outweighed the cost and time to rebuild data and systems.” City of Lafayette Mayor Jamie Harkins explained.

Full article on https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/107023/malware/city-of-lafayette-ransowmare.html

#ransomware #lafayette #ransom #yokdata