Joe Bruno reports:
Mecklenburg County officials are holding a 2 p.m. news conference on the attack and ransom demand. Channel 9 will carry it live HERE and on Facebook Live.
A hacker is holding files on Mecklenburg County‘s server for ransom and has given the county a Wednesday deadline to pay up, according to Mecklenburg County Manager Dena Diorio.
Diorio told Channel 9 that someone opened an email they shouldn’t have opened, which helped the hacker infiltrate the system and cause a countywide outage.
Mecklenburg County officials and attorneys said there is a language barrier with the hacker. They’re trying to determine if the hacker wants two bitcoin, which is roughly $25,000, per server or two bitcoin per file, which would make the ransom demand much higher.
Read more on WSOC-TV.
A language barrier? Seriously? Hard to believe that they seriously wonder if it is is per file as opposed to per server.
Update: Ah, here’s more that helps explain the above. From WNCN:
As of late Wednesday morning, county staff was working to determine whether the hacker was demanding two bitcoins for the information on each of the 30 servers or whether the demand was for two bitcoin for each file on the 30 servers.
It was also unclear Wednesday morning whether the data breach was limited to just 30 servers, as first reported Tuesday night. That information was also being evaluated on Wednesday, WBTV was told.
Even if the breach was limited to 30 servers, at two bitcoins per server, the county could be looking at a minimum bill of $690,000.
It’s not a good sign that they want to know how much the ransom is. That would seem to indicate that backups, which are much cheaper and presumably clean, are not an option.