Georgia Presidential Election Structure Got Hit With Ransomware Attack

Georgia Presidential Election structure was hit with a ransomware attack recently as hackers targeted the infrastructure by attacking important parts of the system as we are reading more in the latest crypto news.

The local government networks were the target of the recent ransomware of the Georgia Presidential Election structure by affecting the critical systems within the network. According to the news reports, the attack on Georgia’s Hall County was disclosed on October 7 while the aftermath of the attack will soon emerge on the surface. According to the release “critical systems within the Hall County Government networks” suffered intrusion of the systems and this could be the first ransomware attack for the election season in the United States.

Katie Crumley, the Hall County spokesperson said that among the affected systems in the county are the signature database and the voting precinct map that is also hosted on the county’s website. She added that the personnel is being successful in bringing some of the programs back to operational as Crumley added:

 “We are currently bringing various programs back online, and those two items are included in that process,”. However, the voting process for our citizens has not been impacted due to the network issues.”

The belief is that the attackers didn’t aim to target election systems specifically and that several other counties function like phone and email services which suffered quite a bit as well. Officials from Hall County report that third-party cybersecurity professionals are working on the recovery as the Georgia Hall County ransomware attacks have been reported as the first incident to strike election-related infrastructure but this was not the sole cause of an attack of this scale in last months. Brett Callow who works as a threat analyst at Emisoft said:

 “At least 18 county or municipal bodies have been impacted by ransomware since the beginning of September — about three per week — so it’s very likely that other bodies will be hit in the run-up to the election.”

Aside from this, the ransomware attack is omnipresent in other countries and companies since in July there was also an intrusion like this in Argentina when the Telecommunications company was attacked as well. The attackers demanded a $7.5 million ransom to be paid with the privacy coin Monero.