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Spring Hill City Hall Recovering After $250k Cyberattack

Posted at 11:19 PM, Nov 15, 2017
and last updated 2017-11-16 00:19:46-05

The city of Spring Hill is still reeling from a week-long cyberattack, with some of the city departments still using pen and paper to get by.

More than a week ago, a ransomware cyberattack at the Spring Hill city hall locked up hundreds of documents the city uses to conduct business every day.  Online criminals asked for $250,000 to unlock the data.

Since the attack, some of the systems have come back online, but in others -- like the 911 center and the utility billing department -- they're still using pen and paper to write down information.

As of Wednesday, the utility billing department was not able to accept credit or debit cards as payment, and it said it was not going to assess late charges for any delinquent accounts during the data recovery process.

They hope to get everything back to normal soon, but they say the work won't end there.

"The real challenge is going to be when we get the systems back up, having to add all the data back in the system, transferring from pen and paper back into a digital system, we expect that's going to take a lot of time," said Victor Lay, the Spring Hill city administrator.

Spring Hill says they did not pay the ransom to get the files back, and they don't think scammers looked at any of the data they locked and held for ransom.

Experts say its important to make backups of your important files, but the backups must be disconnected from the rest of your computer, or else scammers could get those too.