The Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus paid $703,697 to Microsoft to rebuild its IT infrastructure after suffering a ransomware infection in March 2017.
The incident took place on March 3, 2017, when the organization’s entire IT systems, including its web servers, went down at the hands of a yet-to-be-revealed ransomware strain.
The ransomware encrypted files and requested payment of 28 bitcoins for the decryption key to unlock the ransomed data.
The ransom demand was worth nearly $30,000, based on the Bitcoin-to-US dollar exchange rate at the time, but officials declined to pay, opting to restore some of the data from backups and rebuilding its entire IT systems from scratch.
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Source: ZDNet