Tag Archive for: Fulton

‘Click Here’ podcast interviews self-proclaimed leader of ransomware gang in Fulton County cyberattack – WABE

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“Click Here” podcast host Dina Temple-Raston recently interviewed the self-proclaimed leader of the LockBit ransomware, which has been operating for a few years.

The leader, LockBit Supp, is reportedly behind the recent Fulton County cyberattack.

On Friday’s edition of “Closer Look,” Temple-Raston talked with the show host Rose Scott about how her team got LockBitSupp’s contact information and what he revealed during their discussion.

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No Fulton residents’ info leaked by hackers

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Many phones are working again, he said. The water-bill payment system is back online, and work continues on the “big three” systems: tax offices, the courts, and the internal employee system, Anderson said.

Election systems, though temporarily taken offline out of caution, were not affected; and early voting is underway for the March 12 presidential primary, he said.

Anderson hopes all computer systems will be restored within the next month. For those functions still down, county offices — especially the judicial system — have gone back to paper or are using other work-arounds.

The county is working on a case study of “lessons learned” from the attack and response, which it plans to share with other governments and the public, Anderson said.

The LockBit ransomware group claimed responsibility for the Fulton cyberattack, setting a countdown timer on the dark web that displayed some stolen county documents and threatened to release far more if an unspecified ransom wasn’t paid.

LockBit has targeted thousands of governments and companies with ransomware attacks, and an international law enforcement crackdown Feb. 19 took down the group’s website. Police agencies also seized computer servers and cryptocurrency accounts.

Although the takedown was not a direct response to the Fulton County hack, it apparently cut off the hackers’ access to stolen Fulton data. LockBit put up a new web page and set another countdown threat, but that Thursday deadline passed with no document release.

After the deadline expired, Commission Chair Robb Pitts said neither the county nor anyone on its behalf paid any ransom.

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Fulton County water billing services restored after cyberattack

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FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — Water billing service has been restored in Fulton County following a ransomware attack that hit systems last month. 

Customers can now once again log into their accounts and make payments online after services were disrupted for nearly a month after the cybersecurity breach. 

County officials say customers who had payments due during the outage will not incur late fees or other fees associated with the outage, 

It’s still unclear if personal information has been distributed in the cyber attack, according to Fulton County officials.

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Fulton county’s systems were hacked. Already weary officials are tight-lipped | Georgia

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As a Fulton county, Georgia, board of registration and elections meeting began in earnest on Thursday afternoon, the elections director, Nadine Williams, unfurled a prepared statement about a recent hack of county government computers.

“There is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Williams said. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton county and the secretary of state’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts. We are working with our team to securely reconnect these systems as preparations for upcoming elections continue.”

Any time the Fulton county elections board meets, a cantankerous crowd greets them to pepper appointees with challenges to voter registrations or demands for paper ballots or generally unsympathetic noise. The rancor of the 2020 election and its unfounded charges of vote tampering still ripple through the democratic process. Elections officials in Fulton county take care about what they say, knowing that a platoon of critics lie waiting to pounce on a misplaced word.

Even by that standard, county officials have been holding uncharacteristically tightly to a prepared script – or saying nothing at all – in the days since a computer breach debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department to court records to phones.

“Because it’s under investigation, they’re telling me to stick to a list of talking points,” said the Fulton county commissioner Bridget Thorne. “The county attorney drafted them.”

She did say that the county had come under a ransomware attack – and that the county had not paid off the attacker. “We’re insured very well,” she said.

Systems began to fail on the weekend of 27 January. Ten days later, the phones for most departments returned a busy signal error when callers rang them up.

County officials either cannot or will not directly and completely answer important questions about the cyber-attack’s scope. The Fulton county chair Robb Pitts made a brief statement on 29 January about the hack without taking questions.

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