City of Atlanta Hit with Ransomware Attack

Computer systems for the City of Atlanta were hit by an apparent ransomware attack that has caused outages and is now under investigation by the FBI.

According to Atlanta's local news channel 11Alive, the attack appears to have the earmarks of the Samsam variant of ransomware. Some of the city's customer-facing billing and court information systems have suffered outages due to the attacks.

"At this time, our Atlanta Information Management team is working diligently with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue. We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon. Our city website, Atlantaga.gov, remains accessible and we will provide updates as we receive them," the City said in a statement provided to 11Alive.

According to the report, a screenshot from one of the infected machines showed the attackers demanding ransom of $6,800 "per unit," or $51,000 to decrypt the entire system.

For more on this developing story, read the report here.

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