Baltimore Mayor Jack Young announced last week that the U.S. Conference of Mayors (UCSM) passed a resolution calling on mayors to oppose the payment of ransomware attackers. The resolution states that “at least 170 county, city or state government systems have experienced a ransomware attack since 2013” with 22 of those occurring in 2019 so far.
One of those cities is Young’s own Baltimore, which was crippled by a Robbinhood ransomware attack on May 7, causing well more than a month’s worth of turmoil and city service outages that brought down real estate sales in the city and ultimately cost $18 million (and counting) in recovery costs and lost revenues. Baltimore applied for federal disaster funds, and the city’s IT chief publicly apologized for doing a “poor job” of communicating in the wake of the attack. Mayor Young and IT experts say it will still be months before Baltimore’s systems are fully functional.
