Who Got Hacked This Week? February 23 Edition

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Who Got Hacked This Week? February 23 Edition, slide 3

Pennsylvania Town Suffers $1 Million Cyberattack

The city of Allentown, Pennsylvania, is struggling to remediate a malware attack that could cost nearly $1 million to mitigate.

Emotet spread like wildfire around the city’s networks, self-replicating (Emotet can spread itself to other systems by stealing an address book from a computer on the network) and harvesting city employees’ credentials along the way. There’s an intimation that phishing was the initial infection vector: Pawlowski warned city residents not to open emails and attachments from city employees. In the past Emotet has been spread via weaponized Microsoft Word documents.

The virus impacted all city systems that run Microsoft, so the city has hired Microsoft engineers to handle emergency response to the crisis for an initial $185,000. Though the virus has now been contained, Pawlowski said it will cost $800,000 to $900,000 to fully remediate the damage.

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