Media Coverage
Source: Law360
Media Coverage
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Olivia Thomas
03.27.18
Last week’s ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta underscores the cyber risks faced by the public sector and the need for government entities to match cyber defense measures increasingly adopted by the private sector as attacks have become more frequent and more sophisticated. Law360 reports that several of Atlanta’s municipal departments were affected by an outage resulting from a ransomware attack that encrypted some of the city’s data, including information from internal and external customer-facing applications.
As investigators work to determine how the city’s systems were breached, cyber authorities speculate that the attack, like most ransomware breaches, was likely the result of a city employee clicking a link in a phishing email or downloading a suspect file.
If so, Pillsbury Cybersecurity partner Brian Finch tells Law360, “It speaks volumes about how difficult it is to protect infrastructure and the type of investments needed in order to increase cybersecurity in government systems across the country.”
But it’s also possible that the breach was a targeted attack, which Brian Finch says would be equally troubling.
It would be “very unsettling that an adversary would feel bold enough to paralyze a major urban area,” he said. “That shows that cyber criminals have essentially no fear of U.S. law enforcement or deterrence programs, and so any city could come under direct attack at any time.”
Read more about the Atlanta cyberattack on Law360 (subscription required).