San Bernardino County officials said that they paid a $1.1 million dollar ransom to a hacker who took control of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s computer systems.
The attack was first acknowledged by a press release the office of County Sheriff Shannon Dicus on April 9. The press release described the attack as a “network disruption” that was being investigated in conjunction with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
Dawn Rowe, Chair of the County Board of Supervisors spoke with Z107.7 this morning (May 5), saying that the Sheriff’s office, the county, and the federal agencies made the call to pay the ransom.
“The Sheriff was great in working on this. The FBI came in, It was a collaborative consultation of what we should and shouldn’t do. We weighed all of those interests, and the decision was made to pay it.”
The $1.1 milllion dollar ransom will be paid, in part, by an insurance policy, but that the County Board of Supervisors voted to pay the remaining $511,852.
“The Board voted to support the Sheriff’s Department in paying the ransom.”
The Sheriff’s office is currently determining what information was stolen from their systems. Communications from the Sheriff’s office, including email servers and the public release of information, were severely impacted by the disruption.
Rowe said that the County was working the Sheriff’s office to prevent another ransomware incident or cyber attack.
“So the county operations are separate, and our security is separate. Now we are doing an overhaul to bring the Sheriff’s Department under our same umbrella so that we have redundant systems and they’ll go in and do an audit to see what maybe could have been done differently to prevent this in the future.”
The Sheriff’s office has not released any information regarding suspects involved in the cyber attack.
