Lake City recovering from ransomware attack

Lake City, Fla. has started to recover from a June 10 ransomware attack that knocked out its email and online payment systems.

Lake City was hit with TripleThreat ransomware, City Manager Joe Helfenberger said in a statement posted to Facebook. Cloud cybersecurity company AppRiver reported on TripleThreat last January, but at the time only mentioned it was a phishing scheme designed to gather credentials, and did not mention a ransomware component to the malware.

The city updated its status on June 12, saying that while most systems are still down, progress is being made to restore the network and regain access to the locked data. The systems handling the city’s police, fire and other emergency services were not impacted.

“City-wide emails are expected to be restored within a day. Data recovery efforts have so far been successful. The data is there, it just takes time to get it back in a usable format,” said City IT Director Brian Hawkins.