Dylan Suttles reports:
City officials are acknowledging a data breach occurred earlier this month.
Alton Mayor Brant Walker on Tuesday confirmed that what he described as a “data incident” happened on March 5. Walker said the city immediately took steps to secure all of the city’s information networks.
Read more on The Telegraph.
There is allegedly a lot more to this incident than has been publicly discussed by the city. A self-described employee who contacted DataBreaches.net claims that this was a ransomware attack and that the city paid the threat actors $200,000 to get the data deleted. According to this source, the city was not even admitting to employees that their Social Security Numbers were involved in the incident. Employees allegedly received an internal email which only told them that they needed to check their witholding from recent checks closely as the systems were down for a week and the city had to use older data.
DataBreaches.net has filed under Freedom of Information to try to obtain records concerning this incident and the city’s handling of it.