Skip to main content

Hackers seize Atlanta’s network system, demand $51,000 in Bitcoin as ransom

Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms said on Thursday, March 22, that hackers attacked the city’s network system and encrypted data. The details are somewhat slim for now, but hackers reportedly used the SamSam ransomware and demand around $51,000 in Bitcoin to unlock the city’s seized computers. Atlanta is currently working with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, Microsoft, and Cisco cybersecurity officials to determine the scope of the damage and regain control of the data held hostage. 

“Our Atlanta Information Management team is working diligently with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue,” the city’s official Twitter account states. “We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon. Our city website, Atlantaga.gov, remains accessible and we will provide updates as we receive them.” 

Recommended Videos

As of Thursday afternoon, the city said it faced outages on various “internal and customer facing applications,” such as means for accessing court-related information and paying bills. But the city itself isn’t exactly under siege: Airport, public safety, and water operations remain unaffected by the attack, and the city payroll wasn’t touched. The only bone Atlanta is throwing the public is that the attack affects “various city systems.” 

According to Atlanta’s newly appointed chief operating officer, Richard Cox, Atlanta Information Management officials were made aware of problems with internal and customer-facing applications at 5:40 a.m. Thursday. At the time, he acknowledged that the city fell prey to ransomware, but given the investigation is still ongoing, he couldn’t provide the extent of the damage.  

“The ongoing investigation will determine whether personal information, financial, or employee data has been compromised,” he said during a press briefing. “As a precaution, we are asking that all employees take the appropriate measures to ensure their data is not compromised. The city advises employees to monitor and protect personal information and in the coming days we will offer employees additional resources if needed.” 

What the city didn’t officially disclose was the ransomware note discovered in the investigation. A screenshot reveals the hackers’ demands: 0.8 Bitcoins for each seized computer, or six bitcoins to unlock all computers held hostage, equaling to around $51,000 in real cash. Once Atlanta sends the Bitcoins to a digital wallet, the city is to leave a message containing the host name on a specific website. The hackers will then provide decryption software to release the computers from captivity. 

The SamSam malware doesn’t take the typical route of installing itself on computers when unsuspecting owners click a link within an email. Instead, hackers find unpatched vulnerabilities in network servers and manually unleash SamSam to seize key data systems and cause maximum damage to the company’s infrastructure. 

SamSam is one of many in a family of ransomware targeting government and healthcare organizations. It was first observed in 2015 and encrypts various file types using the Advanced Encryption Standard (aka Rijndael). It then encrypts that key with RSA 2048-bit encryption to make the files utterly unrecoverable. 

As of Friday morning, Atlanta’s main website and its affiliated portals remained unaffected by the ransomware attack.

Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
Intel teases a new gaming GPU, and it’s one many thought was canceled
The Arc A770 graphics card running in a PC.

Intel's best graphics card right now is the Arc B580, a midrange card that rivals Nvidia's RTX 4060. However, it's long been rumored that Intel might have more up its sleeve, and fans are waiting for it. Could an Arc B770 be in the works? We just got our first solid sign of it being real, and it might be closer than we thought. What a turn of events, given that we thought it might never see light of day!

Intel's Battlemage lineup is quite modest so far, with only two GPUs out and (sort of) available: The B580 and the B570. However, in the previous generation of GPUs, Intel's flagship was the Arc A770, so it's really no wonder that gamers are asking for an update as to whether we can expect one to appear in this generation.

Read more
Nvidia’s RTX 5080 Super could be coming much sooner than expected
The RTX 5080 sitting on a pink background.

All eyes are on Nvidia and AMD as they get ready to launch some of the best graphics cards for the mainstream market, meaning the RTX 5060 and the RX 9060 XT. However, a new leak tells us that Nvidia is working on a GPU that's set to come out later this year, and it's one that might finally live up to the expectations. I'm talking about the RTX 5080 Super (or Ti).

The tantalizing leak comes from Baidu and was first shared by Wccftech. According to the leaker, who is a moderator on the Baidu forums, Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080S or the RTX 5080 Ti at the end of the year. Spec-wise, we don't know much, but the leaker says it's "basically certain" that the new graphics card will sport 24GB of VRAM, which marks an 8GB upgrade over the RTX 5080. That kind of memory capacity would also put the GPU on par with the RTX 4090.

Read more
The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5080 GPU is $100 off, but there’s a catch
The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card on a white background.

Whether you're upgrading your gaming PC's components or your building one from scratch, you should be on the lookout for GPU deals because graphics cards can get pretty expensive. Here's an offer from Newegg that you should consider: the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card with a $100 discount on its original price of $1,360, which means you're only going to have to pay $1,260. It's an open box product though, but if you're fine with that, you should proceed with your purchase immediately as stocks may run out sooner than you expect.

Why you should buy the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card

Read more