Bingham County Idaho taken down by ransomware

Another County has been taken down by ransomware. The ransom demand here is $25-$30k via Bitcoin or Western union.

“Every department in the county is affected in some way,” “Phone systems, computer systems, everything. Some departments are handwriting documents.”  says Bingham County Commissioner Whitney Manwaring.

The IT staff thought the infection had been cleaned up, but a redundant, backup server was infected again, leading to the county going offline. “We had all kinds of firewalls in place to prevent these kinds of things from happening,” Manwaring told EastIdahoNews.com. “To prevent this from happening again there will likely be several more firewalls and more training for staff using county computers.”

More firewalls? Really? I’m not sure if this was misquoted by the press, or if the County Commish was just not familiar with the terms, but firewalls do very little to stop ransomware. Perhaps they are going to do a better job segmenting the network, and the staff training is a good idea though.


Erich Kron is the Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4, and has over 20 years’ experience in the medical, aerospace manufacturing and defense fields. He is the former security manager for the US Army 2nd Regional Cyber Center-Western Hemisphere.

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