Government

July 27, 2020

Lafayette, Colorado fell victim to ransomware on July 27, which encrypted the city’s computer networks and caused disruptions to phone services, email and online-payment and reservation systems. It’s thought that the unidentified ransomware entered the city’s network via a phishing or brute force attack. Lafayette opted to pay the cyber criminals perceiving it to be the quickest and most cost effective way to restore municipal services to residents.

Other cities across the US have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to criminals in exchange for returning the network.

April 10, 2020

A new wave of data breaches in eight U.S. city governments is the work of online scammers using malicious code against the troubled online payments platform Click2Gov, according to research published Friday by the cybersecurity firm TrendMicro. The attacks involved Magecart-style attacks, in which lines of JavaScript code are injected into e-commerce platforms to rip off financial and personally identifiable information, like credit card numbers, names, addresses and other credentials. Click2Gov has for several years posed data-security problems for as many as 6,000 local governments across the United States who use Click2Gov. But according to TrendMicro, there’s no evidence directly linking the recent Magecart-style attacks to incidents in 2018 and 2019. Still, five of the eight cities analyzed had been victims of previous Click2Gov breaches.

Magecart attacks have plagued corporate websites, including big-name targets like British Airways, Ticketmaster and more than 2 million other websites, according to research published last October.

November 23, 2019

A computer virus downloaded to Archuleta County computers on Nov. 23 encrypted all county servers and files and demanded a $300,000 Bitcoin ransom.

November 13, 2019

A hacked email account scammed the Town of Erie to wire $1 million to a falsified contractor’s account. The FBI is still investigating the case. These comments were offered on the matter: on November 13, 2019, the Erie Police Department opened an investigation into a cyber intrusion which had affected the Town of Erie. The Erie Police Department contacted the FBI Denver Division and requested assistance with the investigation. There is a Canadian Internet Service Provider (ISP) the unknown suspect used. The Internet Provider (IP) Address of the unknown suspect who completed the electronic ACH Enrollment form is in Canada. This Internet Provider (IP) in Canada will not cooperate with this investigation. The FBI continues to look into this aspect of the case.

February 21, 2018

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) was hit by a SamSam ransomware attack that penetrated a temporary system being tested without full security. Once inside, bad actors used it to access CDOT, ultimately affecting roughly half its computing environment, around 400 servers, all databases and applications and around 1,300 workstations. The agency was back to 80 percent functionality six weeks after the ransomware attack, at an estimated cost of up to $1.5 million. The state’s new backup system prevented data loss, but personal data on employees’ computers may not be recovered.

March 22, 2018

On March 22, 2018, Atlanta’s connected systems city-wide were hit with a ransomware message locking their respective files and demanding an approximately $50,000 payment in bitcoin (the price has fluctuated since). The ransomware is believed to be from the group known as SamSam, which has been operating and executing similar attacks since at least 2015. Atlanta residents were unable to do simple city system-dependent tasks like paying parking tickets or utility bills. City employees didn’t get the all-clear to turn on their computers until five days later and many city systems still have not recovered. The cyberattack took more than one-third of Atlanta’s 424 software programs offline or partially offline. The first month of recovery cost almost $3 million.

September 28, 2022

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) warned Americans of an exponential rise in IRS-themed text message phishing attacks trying to steal their financial and personal information in the last few weeks. “In recent months, the IRS has reported multiple large-scale smishing (MMS/SMS/text scams) campaigns targeting taxpayers, that have delivered thousands – and even hundreds of thousands – of IRS-themed messages in hours or a few days, far exceeding previous levels of activity.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a similar warning in July 2022. According to the U.S. communications watchdog’s Robocall Response Team, these phishing messages (or robotexts as the FCC calls them) will hit billions of phones every month.