Village of Key Biscayne hit with a cyberattack

The small Florida municipality of the Village of Key Biscayne has found itself with the dubious honor of joining Baltimore, Atlanta and several other Sunshine State cities by being victimized with by a cyberattack.

Unlike the other victims village officials did not declare ransomware was to blame, instead referring to the incident a “data security event. The attack took place on June 23 prompting the village to temporarily shut down some of its computer operations and switch over to using paper as a backup while forensic teams determine the scope of the attack, Village Manager Andrea Agha told The Miami Herald. Agha said the network was back online by June 26.

The village council met in an emergency session on June 27 and approved an additional, unstated, amount of funding to pay for the outside IT vendor which is helping the village recover the attack.

Florida towns and cities have been particularly hard hit over the last few weeks with Riviera Beach and Lake City both forced to pay their cyberattackers ransom demands when they could not recover their encrypted files from the ransomware planted in their systems.