Atlanta Police Dashcam Footage “Lost And Cannot Be Recovered”

Information on the fallout from the recent Atlanta ransomware attack is emerging, following a public budget meeting–including that years of police dashcam footage have been “lost and cannot be recovered.”

Reports state that ⅓ of all software used by the city has been affected by the attack, and that it has assigned a whopping $9.5 million (£7.1 million) to fund its recovery efforts. Security experts commented below.

Gijsbert Janssen Van Doorn, Technology Evangelist at Zerto:

“Without a data hostage, there is no ransom – that’s the technology mindset organizations, and city authorities such as Atlanta, need to adopt to protect themselves from ransomware. Prevention plans aren’t enough as attacks build in frequency and strength, causing irreparable harm to brand reputation and increasing risk. Instead, organizations need to invest and create full IT resilience plans, including backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility, allowing them to withstand both planned and unplanned disruptions while driving digital transformation. Being able to easily and quickly recover data, like the dashcam footage, from mere seconds before it was lost or disrupted can save an organization time, money and many other types of damage.”

Katie Carty Tierney, Senior Director, Global Sales Engineering at WhiteHat Security:

“Ransomware is just one attack scenario; to guard against these types of situations, companies need to protect against ALL threats. By performing a full vulnerability assessment and fixing the issues, you can protect your company from a far larger threat landscape. If 90 percent of your fence has already fallen over, what’s the use in trying to fix a hole in the 10 percent that’s left up? You need to protect against all threats, not one specific one.

For the companies that are truly concerned about ransomware, in addition to vulnerability assessments, they can follow some easy industry best practices. Backing up data and using up-to-date encryption will help negate some of the risk of ransomware.”