The city of Augusta, in Georgia, U.S., reportedly declared a recent IT system outage was generated by unauthorized entry to its city operating network.
Notably, the nature of the breach was not disclosed by its administration however, the BlackByte ransomware gang has divulged the City of Augusta as one of its victims.
Cyberattack Impact Unclear
Augusta is Georgia’s second-largest known city after Atlanta, with a metropolitan area residents of over 611,000.
Briefly, The city announced on its online portal that it started experiencing technical complications on Sunday, May 21, which disorganized some of its work operations systems.
However, the statement emphasized this incident is entirely unrelated to the IT system outage that occurred the previous week.
Furthermore, An immediate investigation has commenced to determine the impact of the cyberattack and to carry out full functionality restoration.
At the time of writing, It’s unclear at this time if the threat actors managed to access or steal any sensitive data.
BlackByte Makes Cyberattack Claims
Augusta’s IT Department proceeds to diligently investigate the incident, ascertain its impact on our systems, and resuscitate full functionality to our systems, reads the city’s announcement.
Shortly after, the Blackbyte ransomware group made claims of the attack on its website, warning the city’s administration of its threat and asking them to make contact.
Furthermore, BlackBytee asserts to hold onto sensitive data pilfered from the city’s computers and has leaked a sample of 10GB of data as breach-proof.
Additionally, it says to contain payroll data, contact details, personally identifiable information (PII), physical addresses, contracts, and city budget allocation data.
Subsequently, a requested ransom for deleting the stolen data is $400,000, the threat actors also offer to resell the data to interested third parties for $300,000.
Several ransomware attacks across major cities in North America this year have been puzzling, In most cases, they disrupted the delivery of crucial services to citizens.
