Columbus claims that a ransomware gang took 500,000 Ohioans’ personal information.
The state capital of Ohio, Columbus, has acknowledged that during a ransomware attack in July, hackers took 500,000 residents’ personal information.
Columbus acknowledged that a “foreign cyber threat actor” had gained access to its network and obtained resident names, dates of birth, addresses, identification documents, Social Security numbers, and bank account information in a complaint with the state attorney general of Maine.
With almost 900,000 citizens, the city is the most populated in Ohio. It claims that about half a million people were impacted, but it has not verified the precise number of fatalities.
Following a ransomware attack on July 18 of this year, which the city of Columbus claimed to have “thwarted” by cutting off its network from the internet, the regulatory filing was made.
The August attack against Columbus was attributed to the ransomware gang Rhysida, which was also in charge of the British Library hack last year. According to local press sources at the time, the gang claimed to have taken 6.5 gigabytes of documents from the Ohio city, including “databases, employee internal logins and passwords, a full dump of servers with emergency applications used by the city and … access from city video cameras.”
Rhysida demanded payment for the stolen data in the amount of 30 bitcoin, or about $1.9 million at the time of the hack.
The public was informed by Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther two weeks after the cyberattack that the stolen data was probably “corrupted” and “unusable.”
Ginther’s claim was called into question the next day when cybersecurity researcher David Leroy Ross, better known online as Connor Goodwolf, disclosed that hundreds of thousands of Columbus citizens’ personal information was on the dark web.
Ross was accused by Columbus in a September lawsuit of “threatening to share the City’s stolen data with other individuals who would otherwise have no easily accessible means by which to obtain the City’s stolen data.” A judge issued a temporary injunction.
According to a listing on its leak website that TechCrunch was able to view on Monday, Rhysida submitted 3.1 gigabytes of “unsold” data—more than 250,000 files—that were taken from Columbus against Ross in order to deny him access to the stolen information.
Join Our Social Media Channels:
WhatsApp: NaijaEyes
Facebook: NaijaEyes
Twitter: NaijaEyes
Instagram: NaijaEyes
TikTok: NaijaEyes
