The city of Tulsa announced on May 10th that it's systems were compromised by ransomware on April 21st. Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum said that "We have shut out computer systems at the city down to prevent any spread of that malware on our networks." Meaning that city officials are now re-learning how to do their jobs without computers, which as you could imagine after the year we've had that may be quite difficult for some. Tulsa's back-to-basics approach will help isolate the problem and fix it however this attack is affecting city services including fire and police response times. This attack is also affecting citizens on a individual level, for instance, people can't pay their utility bills or get a copy of accident reports. Tulsa may be temporarily crippled, but they say their preventative measures successfully block those attacks on a daily basis.
One IT Professional who is also a Tulsa resident says "The deployment of ransomware typically requires administrative privileges. City officials are downplaying the seriousness of this breach. The resolution for this issue is to simply wipe the affected devices/servers and restore from backups. This process shouldn't take weeks or months as stated in the story. This is the consequence of failing to keep your technological infrastructure up to date and to perform routine security auditing." Now we cannot confirm that Tulsa city officials are downplaying this breach, however we do agree that this shouldn't be a process that takes very much time. Cyber security is an overlooked essential for many, but hopefully this will start to change due to all of the recent malware attacks is that have gained public attention.