Baltimore City IT (BCIT) Down And The City Is Still Immobilized Due To Ransomware Attack, On Second Day Now.

City of Baltimore is under a Ransomeware attack on the city's computer systems and the systems are still frozen after 24 hours.
It looks like the RobinHood virus is responsible for the attack and these usually enter the computer systems through a link or attachment in an email.
According to information acquired by Baltimore newspaper, Baltimore brew;

“The city has had trouble keeping its computers updated with the latest security patches and also does not have centralized security incident monitoring, The official spin will be that there is nothing the city could have done to prevent this. But the root cause is failure to keep their computers updated and failure to detect entry of malicious programs into their network.”

Yesterday City said that every effort is on bringing the services to normal;

“We have a team of folks who are working with others from the state and federal level. They’ve quarantined the problem and are working diligently to bring the systems back on line, Critical city services remain operational,” mayoral spokesman Lester Davis told The Brew, after the malware attack by unidentified hackers began infecting computers at City Hall and other agencies this morning.  

Ransomware is malwareware that locks up a computer network, usually encrypts the storage contents preventing legitimate users from accessing the computer or servers. The attackers then demand a fee (ransom) to provide the keys decrypt the network. Due to it's untracebility the ransom is requested usually in the form of bitcoins or other crypto currency. The RobinHood attackers usually request 3 to 7 bitcoins to decrypt computers or a network and the fee goes up by $10000 per day after the third day.

“The city will not be paying any ransom at all,” Davis declared.

He said he could not predict when the impacted systems would be back online. It seems Baltimore does not have a good disaster recovery plan / system for it's IT network.

Yesterday Baltimore' DPW and Transportation services tweeted the following and they still seem to be down.

The email outage has also taken down phone lines to Customer Support and Services, so for now we're unable to take calls to discuss water billing issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

— BaltimoreDPW (@BaltimoreDPW) May 7, 2019

Due to Network/email outage BCDOT's following services have been impacted:
1. The impound lots at Pulaski Facility (Main) and Fallsway Facility
2. The Right-of-Way Services Division

We apologize for the inconvenience.

— Baltimore City DOT (@BmoreCityDOT) May 7, 2019