According to sources, City of Wheat Ridge & Wheat Ridge Police Department (a Public Safety organization in Colorado) was hit with a cyber attack. It was first reported on 2022-08-31.
Source 1 | 2022-08-31
“• “On Monday, Wheat Ridge's IT staff began shutting down parts of the city's server after the incident was identified, causing City Hall, many city services, email and phone to be unavailable.” • “The city is working with a team of independent experts and federal agencies to investigate, and IT employees are working to safely restore operations.” • “In addition, the Wheat Ridge Police Department is still operational except for the records division, and the non-emergency number is currently unavailable.”“
Source 2 | 2022-09-22
“• “Wheat Ridge was recently hit by an overseas ransomware attack. The hackers initially demanded $5 million to unlock the city’s data they seized but Wheat Ridge is refusing to pay.” • ““The city has made the determination not to pay a ransom,” Amanda Harrison, a Wheat Ridge spokeswoman, said this week. “The city’s IT professionals are working diligently to restore files stored within the city’s network from viable backups.” • “It took three weeks from the Aug. 29 cyberattack for Wheat Ridge to determine that it had adequate redundancies and the know-how to put its databases and systems back into operation without the help of the hackers, who demanded payment in a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency known as Monero.” • “Wheat Ridge is the second Colorado municipality to recently get knocked offline by a relatively new ransomware attack known as BlackCat, which cybersecurity experts characterize as particularly pernicious and aggressive. BlackCat is encoded with a more stable and robust programming language, called Rust, that is harder for system administrators to detect.”“
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