The city of Naples in Florida is the latest city to be hit by hackers in a targeted spear-phishing campaign.
Hackers disguised themselves as representatives from the Wright Construction Group and targeted the city in a spear-phishing campaign, resulting in the loss of $700,000 from the city. The Wright Construction Group once did infrastructure-related work in downtown Naples. Consequently, a member of an unnamed department transferred $700,000 to a fake bank account provided by the attackers.
City Manager Charles Chapman insists that the incident is isolated and that the city's data systems were not impacted by this attack. Chapman claimed, "The City’s data systems are safe and secure. This attack was not malware or ransomware, no data breach occurred. The City has and will continue to make improvements to our information technology systems."
Naples is the fourth city in Florida to be hit by an attack in less than two months. Riviera Beach was recently hit by a ransomware attack and paid hackers $600,000 to regain access to computer systems. Lake City also paid out $460,000 in ransom demands after hackers took control of the city's municipal computer systems.
To defend against ransomware and malware, NNT suggests utilizing our Ransomware Mitigation Kit, designed to help organizations across all industries and sizes defend against devastating ransomware attacks.