Town Forced to Use Typewriters After Ransomware Attack
Marie Donlon | August 02, 2018Following a recent Ransomware attack, government workers in a borough of Alaska are turning to an older device to help them complete their work: typewriters.
While the borough rebuilds its entire system — after malware had encrypted its internal systems, disaster recovery servers and email server — employees working for the borough of Matanuska-Susitna are taking notes using the old-fashioned devices.
According to reports, almost all of the department’s 500 computers and 120 computer servers had been infected with the software that scrambles data and then asks for a ransom to restore it.
Unfortunately, the July 24 attack did not only infect the desktop computers and email server. Other systems such as the telephone and door entry card system were similarly disrupted.
Yet there is some hope as employees complete their work using the typewriters.
"Though it initially appeared that our data was a complete loss, we have recently recovered data from the shared drives," said IT director Eric Wyatt.
"Email does appear to be completely unrecoverable.
"There is optimism for the recovery of additional data.
"Encrypted data will be stored for months or years in hopes that the FBI will recover the decryption keys," said Wyatt.