Uh oh! The city of Atlanta’s computer network has been targeted by a group of hacker demanding a large ransom.

Officials sent out an outage alert yesterday, saying the city was “experiencing outages on various internal and customer-facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information.”

Now the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have gotten involved after the cyberattack, caused by ransomware which locks computers and holds data for ‘ransom,’  was found on the City of Atlanta’s servers.

Details below…

“The city of Atlanta has experienced a ransomware cyber attack,” Richard Cox, the city’s chief operating officer, announced at a news conference yesterday afternoon.

“This attack has encrypted some of the city data, however, we’re still validating the extent of the compromise.”

Ransomware locks the computers of the victim and holds their data “hostage” until they pay a fee, usually in cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said workers began noticing peculiar activity on parts of the city’s computer network around 5:40 a.m. yesterday

“This is a very serious situation,” Bottoms said at the news conference.

Mayor Bottoms and Cox said the attack caused outages to multiple internal and external applications for the city, including apps people use to pay bills and view court-related information.

The Mayor has advised all city employees to be proactive and monitor their bank accounts for suspicious activity.

“We don’t know the extent, so I would ask for people to assume that you may be included,” Bottoms said.

Neither Bottoms or Cox would say how much the hackers demanded in ransom or if the city will pay it.

“Our information management team is working with the FBI, homeland security, also external partners from Microsoft and Cisco Cybersecurity incident response team to help resolve this issue,” Bottoms said.

“We have been working diligently all day long to try to come to some type of resolution.”

Atlanta is just the latest victim of hackers freezing computers for ransom. Last May, a global ransomware attack hit over 200,000 companies, hospitals, government agencies and other organizations in 150 countries.

What are your thoughts about the City of Atlanta’s recent cyber attack?