Ransomware hits North Miami Beach Police Department demanding millions of ransom

Ransomware has now become a daily headline. This encrypting malware has infected the North Miami Beach Police Department encrypting data and demanding millions of ransom. The Police Department’s IT cell did identify the malicious behavior and immediately shut down all its systems, informed the FBI, U.S. secret service, and Miami-Dade Police Department. 

How is the Miami Police Department handling the attack?

The Police Department also mentioned that there were no interruptions in public services and safety. The officials are now working with the U.S. officials and a third party forensic investigator to identify the entry, motive and depth of the attack in detail. Last year the United States Conference of Mayors came together and pledged that they will not encourage the payment of ransoms whenever an entity gets hit by the ransomware attack, hope The Miami Police Department would stand by the pledge. 

Though the officials mention that the services aren’t affected, the encrypted data could belong to the citizens or residents of the county. Miami officials are investigating the attack to find the details of the data that have been encrypted. Also to be noted that two bills were passed in the United States to ban municipalities from spending the tax payers hard-earned money as ransoms for cyber criminals.

Preventive and reactive measures for organizations

Ransomware attacks will continue to increase in 2020, and organizations are advised to build robust cybersecurity strategies to defend against cyberattacks. Organizations can organize their strategies into proactive and reactive approach, proactive tools like patching, fixing the misconfigurations, firewalls, endpoint management, vulnerability management, data management, blacklisting and whitelisting applications, and more could give you an immunity over cyberattacks.

However, the reactive tools like SIEM, endpoint security, log management and more could assist organization in detecting the infection using alerts to the earliest. Roaming users can also be taken care of using mobile device management capabilities. 

Right cyber strategy and awareness can remove your organization from the hackers radar. In the case of the Miami Police Department, the IT department identified the threat immediately, thus reducing the impact of the attack. However, the entire details of the attack, its intensity, and the data that was encrypted is yet to be disclosed. 

When this article was written, the details of the breach were not been revealed. In a week, there were ransomware attack in multiple organizations, the Bouygues Constructions, Rockdale County and now Miami Police Department.

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