State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Michigan County's Ransomware Recovery Plan Minimizes Impact of Network Attacks

Government Technology: As hackers, virus writers and cybercriminals become more creative about how to disguise and plant malware, it is becoming increasingly crucial for government and industry to adopt precautions against ransomware attacks. In 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded $2.9 million in losses as a result of cyberscamming.

And while the monetary loses are quantifiable, there also are the losses of time, data and inconvenience — all of which are more challenging to measure.

Take Michigan's Livingston County, one of many counties experiencing ransomware attacks that, on occasion, left its employees unable to tend to daily business. The local government organization receives more than 25,000 port scans per week of criminals doing reconnaissance work on the network and several thousand malware attacks per day.

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