State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Colorado Hack Offers Larger Lessons for Cybersafety

Government Technology: The ransomware cyberattack against the city of Atlanta in March was arguably the year’s most devastating cyberattack against a municipality, but the state of Colorado suffered a significant attack one month earlier that remains a source of valuable lessons for the public sector.

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) was hit by a brute-force attack in late February by a variant of the SamSam ransomware that penetrated a temporary system being tested without full security. (Officials strongly recommended securing even systems being tested or in limited deployment.) Once inside, bad actors used it to access CDOT, ultimately affecting roughly half its computing environment, around 400 servers, all databases and applications and around 1,300 workstations.

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