Pottawatomie County paid the ransom to recover its systems

Pottawatomie County restored operations that were suspended after a ransomware attack hit its systems on September 17, 2021.

Officials at Pottawatomie County announced to have fully recovered their IT infrastructure that was hit by a ransomware attack on September 17, 2021.

County Administrator Chad Kinsley announced that the county opted to pay the ransomware, they revealed that they have paid less than 10% of the ransomware initially demanded by the ransomware operators.

Kinsley did not reveal how much the Pottawatomie County paid, but WIBW-TV has filed an open record request to determine the ransom paid by the county.

“We are a small county with small resources,” declared Kinsley. “With the extraordinary demands that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on local governments like ours, we wanted to make sure that the hackers understood that there was no way we could even come close to meeting their demand,” he said. “We were focused on protecting taxpayers and doing everything we could to resolve the issue with as little as possible. We believe we succeeded at that.”

County experts are investigating the security breach with the help of law enforcement.

IT staff at the County has taken further security measures to improve its resilience and prevent similar security breaches in the future.

At the time of this writing, most county offices recovered their operations, anyway, it will take additional time to fully restore some services. The County IT personnel is working to recover all the impacted machines.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

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