Santee to pay $603,000 to third-party contractors after ‘cybersecurity incident’ – NBC 7 San Diego

The City of Santee paid a third-party company $603,000 following a “cybersecurity incident” on August 20.

According to a statement from the city to NBC 7, the attack affected the computer network that serves the administrative offices, but “there was no impact to systems supporting 911 services and the outage did not cause any public safety issues.”

They added that the city remains open for business and has enlisted “certain third parties” to assist. According to an agenda item for the Santee City Council meeting on September 25, $603,000 was paid on September 10 to a company called Coveware. On its website, Coveware describes itself as a “ransomware recovery first-responder.”

“They offer a variety of services, such as negotiating ransomware attacks, payment facilitation, incident response and recovery assistance,” Nikolas Behar, an associate professor of cybersecurity at the University of San Diego, told NBC 7.

Although Behar is not familiar with the details of this incident, he shared his experience. When asked about the city's payment to the company, he said, “We can't say what they actually did with the money. Six hundred thousand dollars seems like a lot for an incident response, so not 100%, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the money was actually used to pay the ransomware crew.”

Behar explained that hackers are often part of larger, well-organized organizations that are very similar to the companies they attack, and they are rarely located in the U.S. As for their targets, they constantly scan the Internet for vulnerabilities, and when they find one, they hold the owner's data hostage.

The city said it is currently investigating what information may have been compromised and what led to the incident, but it could take weeks or even months for the investigation to be completed, which Behar said is not an unusual time frame for this type of incident.

Behar added that for anyone who fears they may be affected, he suggests “freezing their credit score to prevent people from opening accounts in their name with potentially leaked personal information.”

NBC 7 asked the city of Santee for more information about the incident, as well as details about which budget the $603,000 payment came from, but authorities declined to release any further information at this time.

This is an evolving story.