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A cyberattack can be expensive – and we aren’t just talking about the ransoms cybercriminals are demanding to recover your system.

Just ask the City of Atlanta.

According to an article on ZDNet, the City of Atlanta is expected to spend at least $2.5 million on incident response, recovery and crisis management following a ransomware attack that impacted a large portion of the city’s online services.

The city, which was hit by SamSam Ransomware in March of this year, never paid the $55K in bitcoin ransom, but is now paying millions to help repair the damage.

According to the article, the city is earmarking the $2.5 million to go toward hiring a local security firm for emergency incident response services; advisory services for cyber incident response; and hiring a public relations firm that specializes in crisis response management.

The city may have been able to avoid being hit by cybercriminals had they made sure system and software updates were implemented. Updating your systems with patches is key to defending a network against common viruses and malware.

Unfortunately the City of Atlanta had to learn this the hard way. According to the article, the city’s networks were left unpatched for weeks.

Businesses should look at Atlanta’s current headache as a wakeup call and review their current network security solutions.

For more information on AppRiver’s email and cybersecurity services, visit www.appriver.com

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