Attack against City of Augusta claimed by BlackByte ransomware gang

On Friday 2nd of June 2023, the city of Augusta in Georgia, U.S. confirmed that the recent IT system outage was caused by unauthorized access to its network. The city explained that it started experiencing technical difficulties on Sunday, May 21, which disrupted some of its computer systems.

“Augusta’s Information Technology Department continues to work diligently to investigate the incident, to confirm its impact on our systems, and to restore full functionality to our systems as soon as possible,” -the city’s announcement. 

Even though the administration has not disclosed the nature of the cyberattack, the BlackByte ransomware gang has claimed responsible by posting the City of Augusta on its extortion site. BlackByte claims to hold a large number of files that contain sensitive data stolen from Augusta’s computers and has already leaked a sample of 10GB of data as proof of their breach. The demanded ransom for deleting the stolen information is $400,000. BlackByte ransomware gang also offers to resell the data to interested third parties for $300,000.