In what appeared to be an event of its first kind, the police offers in Maine had to play ransom to solve a hostage situation. It took place in the Bitcoin crypto currency, to help regain the access of the computer systems, which was held hostage by the cyber criminals.
Five police departments were involved to crack this case and help it sort out with the help of ransom money, states Labnol. Their computer system which is called the Burgess Computer system was hit by a malware attack and a malicious code was written in a way that it over rode several encrypted administrative files. This violation soon alerted the Burgess and they came to a conclusion that the only way out of this was to pay the hackers, states The American Register. .
The identity of the hackers have still not been identified, and it continuous to puzzle the police department how a group of hackers can force them to give a buyout. The Bitcoin ransom equaled to $ 300 and was given to the hackers.
When the system had come under attack, the officials were worried that their files could have been deleted, because the malware which had attacked the files had the properties to delete all the files under its attack in a few days. Hence, all the officials were on their toes, trying to solve this case.
The police had one more option of tackling this situation; they could have wiped off their hard disk of all the files and scheduled a system backup, the vicious software attack did not let them do this also.
No important file or information was damaged in this unexpected breach of security, the Sherif said in a statement.