The City of Santee paid $603,000 to a third-party company following a “cybersecurity incident” that occurred on Aug. 20.
According to a statement sent to NBC 7 by the city, the attack affected computer networks that serve administrative offices, but “systems that support 911 services were not affected and the outage did not pose a public safety issue.”
The city added that it remains open for business and has asked “certain third parties” for assistance. According to the agenda for the Santee City Council’s Sept. 25 meeting, $603,000 was paid on Sept. 10 to a company called Coveware. On its website, Coveware describes itself as a “first responder for ransomware recovery.”
“They offer a variety of services, including negotiating ransomware, facilitating payments, responding to incidents and assisting with recovery,” Nicholas Behar, an adjunct cybersecurity professor at the University of San Diego, told NBC7.
Behar may not be familiar with the details of the incident, but he offers his perspective based on his own experience. When asked about how much the city paid the company, he said, “We don’t know what they actually did with that money. $600,000 seems like a lot to me to pay for an incident response, so I’m not 100%, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that money actually went to the ransomware perpetrators.”
Behar explained that hackers tend to be part of large, well-organized organizations similar to the companies they attack, and are rarely located in the U.S. When choosing a target, hackers constantly scan the Internet for vulnerabilities, and when they find one, they hold the owner’s data hostage, he said.
Behar said the city is investigating what information may have been leaked and how it led to the incident, but that the investigation could take weeks or months to complete — a lengthy period that is not uncommon for this type of incident.
Behar also suggested that anyone who worries they may have been affected “place a credit freeze on your account to prevent others from opening accounts on your behalf using personal information that may have been leaked.”
NBC 7 has reached out to the City of Santee for more information about the incident and details about what part of the budget the $603,000 payment came from, but officials have declined to release any further information at this time.
This is a developing story.
