In brief A city in Colorado, USA, has swallowed its pride and paid off a malware gang after deciding the cost of a network nuke-and-pave was too high.
The city of Lafayette – technically a home-rule municipality – with a population of around 30,000, said it has opted to pay ransomware criminals a $45,000 (£35,000) fee after deciding that it was a better use of cash than spending time and money wiping and reformatting all of their machines.
"Ransom payment was not the direction the city wanted to go, and pursued all avenues to find alternative solutions," Lafayette officials admitted. "In a cost/benefit scenario of rebuilding the city’s data versus paying the ransom, the ransom option far outweighed attempting to rebuild. The inconvenience of a lengthy service outage for residents was also taken into consideration."
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