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Nearly 6 Weeks Later, City Still Dealing With Ransomware Attack

April 30th, 2018

Weeks later, the city of Atlanta is still recovering from a ransomware attack.

Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press

The City of Atlanta has now spent at least $4 million recovering from a ransomware attack. Nearly six weeks later, things still aren’t 100 percent back to normal.

Last week, the law department took questions from city councilmembers about bonuses and prizes former Mayor Kasim Reed gave without council approval.

Assistant City Attorney Joan Clarke told the finance committee they aren’t sure whether her department gave those payments a green light. She said someone did write a memo to human resources about it, but the office just can’t read the document right now.

“Granted with the current situation where we are unable to access our files, we have been unable to retrieve that memo,” she said.

Finance committee chair and Councilmember Howard Shook says he empathizes. His office lost 16 years-worth of files in the attack.

“All my computers got wiped out and everything on them,” he said.

The city did not respond to questions Monday about whether the bonus memo is still lost.

The millions of dollars of city money have been spent on emergency procurement contracts for cybersecurity, crisis response services and IT recovery.

Morgan Wright is a cybersecurity analyst.

“The hard dollars are one thing, the soft dollars around that are going to be huge. I think it will be three to four times this, if not more,” he said.

Wright said that includes things like lost revenue from delayed payments and extra employee work hours spent on the issue.

You still can’t pay your water bill over the phone, but the water department does have a new, separate website to handle online payments.

The Colorado Department of Transportation suffered a similar ransomware attack in February, though it had implemented a robust backup system last year. It has taken them over nine weeks and $1-1.5 million to recover 98 percent of their systems, said spokesperson Brandi Wildfang Simmons.