About 160 speed and red-light cameras were targeted in the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack in Victoria Australia.
The 2017 attack reportedly caused a loss of $20 million in revenue, and about 70,000 fewer bookings.
Police Minister Lisa Neville in 2018 said there was a need for cultural change in the department after she wasn’t told about the attack until it was made public.
Two years later, Former Road Safety Commissioner John Voyage, in his last annual report in the role, says the urgent improvements he recommended to protect Victoria’s cameras are still waiting.
In the report he quoted saying “However, I am concerned there has been insufficient action taken with some recommendations”.
Its been two years and still it seems like Victoria and maybe other parts of Australia are known to be vulnerable to cyber attacks, so for Victoria the question is not a if someone will hack to them again but when someone will hack and how big the damage is going to be.
During 2019 Baltimore city in the USA got hit by a malware with estimated cost to the city of 18 million dollars.
5 months later, Officials in Baltimore approved the city’s purchase of $20 million in cyber-insurance coverage.
“As the world changes and as criminal acts change, you have to adjust,” City Council President Brandon Scott said. “This is an adjustment well worth it to protect the citizens of Baltimore and most importantly protect their taxpayer dollars in the event this happens again.”
The policies approved by Baltimore’s five-member Board of Estimates will include incident-response coverage, business-interruption loss and ransom payments.
Cybersecurity professionals say even when a city pays a ransom, it can still incur major costs to restore systems, ensure they aren’t still infected and bolster defenses to ward off future attacks.
Baltimore officials detailed That they spent nearly $4 million in emergency contracts with IT firms related to the May ransomware attack in addition to other expenses.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said there is a growing pattern of ransomware attackers going after larger enterprises rather than individual users. The bureau says most ransomware cases in the U.S. aren’t publicly reported and victimized companies are particularly eager to avoid the negative publicity.
That’s it for this podcast, stay safe and see you in the next podcast.
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