In the early morning of Friday August 16th 2019, hackers managed to infiltrate the networks of 22 local government organisations in Texas via a third-party services provider, planting ransomware that encrypted data and disrupting business-critical services.
The hackers’ demand? A cool $2.5 million for the decryption keys to unlock the data.
It was the latest in a brutal wave of ransomware attacks that have blighted US cities this year, and have even led some states to declare a state of emergency.
But Texas decided to do something different from the other states hit by ransomware: they didn’t pay up.
As the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) has announced on its website, “more than half of the impacted entities are back to operations as usual.”
The DIR statement makes clear that it decided to clean up the infections for itself, and rebuild systems and restore data from secure backups, rather than put any cash into the pockets of the criminals who attacked its systems:
Through the dedication and vision of the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer at the Texas Department of Information Resources, a response plan was in place and ready to be put into action immediately. Within hours of receiving notice of the even ..
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