Officials Of Baltimore Are Shut Down By Google After Ransomware Attack

The government of Baltimore is currently recovering from a disastrous attack that results in its system being locked up. However; officials had a new issue. The Baltimore Sun reported that city departments are blocked from accessing Gmail accounts. As Baltimore officials had to find a way to resume working, they created Gmail addresses as a temporary solution.

Earlier this month, on 7^th May, the government systems of Baltimore city were locked up by a ransomware attack. The assault had frozen the city's water bill paying system and other services, as well as blocked emails, leading to a demand for a solution. The attackers wanted the city to hand over bitcoin in order to reverse this attack. Much as officials are trying their best to tackle this problem, but it might as well take up to several months for the issue to go away. A number of people have already created free accounts on Gmail to use in the meantime.

Different types of users are clearly distinguished by Google. The company only require business and organization users to pay in order to use the service, not the individual ones. As for the mayor’s office, the systems defined city officials as members of an organization, thus shutting down their temporary Gmail accounts. As reported by the Sun, each and every email of the mayor’s office, health department, as well as city council aides, are believed to bounce.

A representative of Google stated that the security systems of the company had identified a number of accounts were created in a short time. This representative mentioned that Google had reopened Gmail accounts of Baltimore’s officials and indicated that their system only disabled those emails as a consequence of the creation of multiple accounts from the same network.