This one might be scored as hackers 1, Riviera Beach 0.
Riviera Beach City Commissioners have voted to pay ransom to the hacker who shut down city computers.
During a special city council meeting Monday, commissioners voted in favor of using city insurance to pay a hacker 65 Bitcoins, which equates to around $600,000.
At the beginning of June, the city’s interim IT director, Justin Williams, said a city-wide computer outage was caused by a malicious virus sent in an email.
The outage forced the Riviera Beach Police and Fire departments to write down 911 calls of paper. Officials say they receive about 280 calls a day.
Williams said the cost to completely fix and insure the affected systems will cost more than $1,000,000.
During Monday’s special meeting Riviera Beach’s city manager said, “hopefully this will return the city’s computer system to being fully operational.”
She also said law enforcement is investigating, and there will be more information at the conclusion of the inquiry.
WPEC-CBS12 is the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s news partner.
