Baltimore is still spending money on the hacking mess which paralyzed some of the city’s operations: $10 million now approved to spend on the recovery. This is one benefit Nigerian governments (local, state and federal) enjoy: most of our computers are neither networked not fully Internet hooked. And even when linked to the web, they are slow for hackers to execute any action before the network times out!
Baltimore City officials approved using $10 million in excess revenue to cover the ongoing cost of the cyber attacks that immobilized some of the city’s systems almost two months ago.
WBAL reports the city’s estimates board approved the emergency funds Wednesday to help the hack recovery process, which is moving into its eighth week.
This month, a Baltimore technology official said the city had initially resisted help from the state after the attack.
You may not have noticed: as our networks get faster in Nigeria, loss to cyber crime increases! I have no data to back that up. But in Moscow few years ago, Russian “fortune finders” gathered around me in Moscow where the Mayor of Moscow and a minister had invited me to give a speech, asking me why Nigerian banks’ networks were always timing out. Upon return, I joked to a bank CEO: your best cyber strategy is slow network. Of course, banks are not listening as they have been making the networks faster. Lol. We know the outcome. Hahaha.
Back to the Baltimore case: why do American cities pay ransomware payments to hackers instead of using their FBI or DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to burst the attacks. Ransomware is a type of attack where hackers remotely take over your computers and will only release so after you have made a payment.
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Simply, why do governments pay when the powers of the states are behind them? I understand using the state may take time. But this is happening so often and yet a small city will prefer to spend $millions instead of giving agents say two days to do some works. The money sent to hackers end up somewhere which means they can be tracked! It seems confusing because it is expectedly different when a private company is attacked. But for a government, I had expected support from the best in the trade.
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Sometimes what you consider a drawback may end up being your saviour, there are those who are still alive simply because there was small delay while going in the direction death could have take them out.
Our network is slow, and the slowness has saved a lot of money for many institutions here today, you can imagine what spending billions of naira on cyber attacks would mean here.
It now leads to a quandary of some sort: keep it slow, and you end up frustrating some people; make it fast, and you could go bankrupt. One way or the other, something has to give in.
Of course, we hope there is fast network with accompanying investment in security