Should governments pay extortion payments after a ransomware attack?

When it comes to ransomware attacks this year, it’s been a tale of three cities.

In May, the city of Baltimore suffered a massive ransomware attack that took many of its systems down for weeks — restricting employees’ access to email, closing online payment portals and even preventing parking enforcement officials from writing parking tickets. After the attack, the city’s mayor said several times the city would not be paying the extortion request, but it’s still expected to cost the city more than $10 million to recover.

But two cities — albeit smaller ones — in Florida chose to take a different route. Last month, the governments in Lake City and Riviera Beach chose to pay off their attackers in exchange for the return of their data after ransomware attacks, though they still face some work in decrypting the stolen data.

The cities paid the hackers a combined $1 million in Bitcoin — and researchers say these kinds of attacks aren’t going to slow down. So when the next city or state government gets hit, should they pay up, or start the long process of manually recovering their data? We asked experts from Cisco Talos and Cisco Security to weigh in. Check out their answers over on the Cisco blog here.

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