Case study City shakedown A targeted extortion attack leaves a local government in a predicament Public entities tend to have tighter budgets than organizations operating in the private sector, and this can have an impact on their ability to invest in IT security. As a result, they are becoming an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. For example, in 2018, Atlanta’s municipal government was hit by an outbreak of SamSam ransomware that brought down their computer systems for a number of days, resulting in numerous municipal services being impaired and a bill in the region of $2.7 million to recover from the incident. More recently, in May 2019, Baltimore’s government fell victim to a ransomware attack, causing widespread disruption. Whether these were targeted o

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