Thomas Claburn reports:
Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been unable to comply with the settlement terms of a 27-year-old lawsuit over prison conditions because of a ransomware attack last week that saw prisoners back under manual control.
County officials on January 6, 2022, filed a notice [PDF] with the New Mexico District Court overseeing the settlement invoking an emergency provision in the settlement terms to temporarily suspend their obligations.
Commissioners told the court that all of Bernalillo County, which covers the US state of New Mexico’s largest city Albuquerque, had been affected by a January 5, 2022, ransomware attack, including the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) that houses some of the state’s incarcerated.
Read more on The Register.
Those of us tracking ransomware attacks identified this attack as possibly the first ransomware attack on a government entity in the new year. Whether there are other earlier ones that we have not yet been informed about remains to be seen.