BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The crippling cybersecurity attack on Baltimore City enters its ninth day, as city officials continue to say they can’t say much about the investigation.

City Council President Brandon Scott has called for a committee to look into the city’s cybersecurity and its response to this attack.

Hackers are demanding a ransom from Baltimore City, and have warned the City would lose its data after 10 days.

The deadline is on Friday.

“I think if they delete data, we’re going to be in a world of hurt,” said Chris Sachse, ThinkStack.

Sachse is the CEO at ThinkStack, a Baltimore cybersecurity firm.

He said if the hackers have access to any backup systems, it could mean trouble.

“It’s still somewhat of an active crime scene, so they’re trying to follow the bread crumbs to see who did this,” Sachse said.

Wednesday afternoon, officials struggled to answer questions regarding the city’s preparation for a cyber attack like this, any contact with the hackers and who the city has hired to help them recover.

“Honestly, a lot of the lack of transparency is that they don’t’ know,” Sachse said.

Experts claim hackers demanded 13 bitcoins within 10 days, which totals up to $100,000.

But that demand would keep going up every day after four days.

“It’s a fairly reasonable amount of money in the grand scheme of things to ask from a city,” Sachse said.

However, paying would not guarantee a solution.

“You have no idea if that hacker is going to give you what you need. Are they going to give you that decyrption key? If they give you the decyrption key, is it going to work?”

“How much money are going to spend to try to decrypt these passwords and how much risk are we willing to take that the guy won’t delete those files? To me, for 70 thousand, now 100 thousand, I would pay that.” Sachse said.

The ransomware struck citywide, but particularly the City Finance Department.

Online billing remains down as does the ability to close real estate transactions, no title searches, no lien certificates.

“It will get resolved. It has to be resolved. There’s no way we can avoid that.” said Bob Flynn, In-House Title Co.’s attorney.

In the only timeline to which officials Wednesday would commit, they said they hope the lien system will be up late next week.

Sachse said even if the city pays the ransom, which Mayor Jack Young said he won’t do, there is still no way of knowing whether other malware may be in the system- meaning the investigation and recovery would still be slow and intensive.

Paul Gessler

Comments (25)
  1. Bob Areddy says:

    No long term backups? Good going Baltimore.

  2. Jimmy Kilpatrick says:

    Nothing they could lose is worth anything anyway. The cesspool has been run by liberals for years.

  3. Ella Ballard says:

    DECRYPTION, not decyrption.

  4. Dave Fay says:

    Baltimore, we make Detroit look livable!




    Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-White.

  6. Donny Dingle says:

    Wipe the slate clean and start over. Don’t give in to extortion.

  7. Bob Suyak says:

    Another dem run city. Can’t figure how it can get any worse.

  8. Richard Baker says:

    Well, they probably deserve this. Democrats running anything is a disaster.

  9. Min Tun says:

    Well deserved… citizens can even pay for the traffic camera tickets! NICE!
    Baltimore City’s predatory speed cam practices are outrageous with 6 lane highways having 30mph limit cameras on them! Hurrah for these Hackers. I hope the City looses all its data!

  10. Jim Wolfson says:

    Wipe the servers, like with a cloth, then quit and go learn to code, government parasites.

  11. Larry Mason says:

    but think of all the money saved by hiring incompetents to handle cyber security.

  12. This couldn’t happen to a more deserving city. A cesspool of liberal squalor.

  13. Kevin Jamison says:

    Call John Wick!,,


    2 Options:

    1) Pay the ransom
    2) Remove all hardrives,put in new ones, reinstall OS (do backups)

    When you hire primates to run your city, expect chaos and criminality.

  15. For nearly 300 years Baltimore kept track of its city records without an incident. How did they do that? First. they didn’t have city workers looking at pornography on city/county time. And second, they kept their records on paper in big books.