City of Edcouch suffered from a data breach

City of Edcouch in Hidalgo County of Texas, United States, has suffered from a data breach when access to Edcouch city's network was gained by a hacker, who stole all information of the city. The hacker has stolen many confidential files from computer network of the Edcouch city and then left a ransom demand behind. In a ransom note, the hacker has threatened to remove all the information of the city in case ransom demand is not paid. The hacker has demanded $40,000 in Bitcoins as ransom.

Information from city finances and the water department were also compromised in this cyber attack. In fact, the telephone services of the City Hall were even down due to this hack.

As per one of the local news outlet, Victor De La Cruz (the City Manager) said that "on Monday morning, when we came in, we found a ransom note where our system had been hacked and basically the ransom note gave us some instructions to follow if we wanted to save our data".

This cyber attack is getting investigated by Homeland Security after information of over 3,000 residents got stolen. La Cruz said that this attack comes after recent arrest of former city manager. The former city manager was arrested for alleged tampering with the government records and water meters.

La Cruz added that "in recent investigations we have been investigating issues with water meters and that sort of thing. There's actually been a couple of arrests from that investigation. We're looking at the possibility or it's so obvious or coincidental that a week later we get hacked".

The information of the city stored in the network was constantly backed up, thus the officials of the city are gradually recovering all information from their backup. De La Cruz said that "we're definitely going to up our game when it comes to security".

The city officials were asking the residents to remain patient during the investigation. They assure the residents that they have been working closely with Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the IT department in order to implement much better antivirus along with firewall software.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/24/2019