The police department in a small town in Texas, Cockrell Hill, with only 4,000 residents, was recently hit with ransomware.

Eight years of evidence was encrypted. The malware entered their server as a result of a spam email that arrived “from a cloned email address imitating a department issued email address.” The ransom amount is a reported 4 Bitcoin in ransom, worth about $3,600 today, or “nearly $4,000” as the department put it.

Their backups failed.

The cops then spoke to the FBI “and upon consultation with them it was determined there were no guarantees that the decryption file would actually be provided, therefore the decision was made to not go forward with the Bitcoin transfer and to simply isolate and wipe the virus from the servers”

The ransomware affected Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, body camera videos, some in-car video, some in-house surveillance video, and some photographs that were stored on the server.

Although the event happened in December, no announcement was made until the department started telling defense attorneys that "video evidence in some of their criminal cases no longer exists”.

Stephen Barlag, Cockrell Hill’s police chief, said of the encrypted docs: “None of this was critical information.” Defense attorneys are taking issue with this revelation.

Source: Security Newspaper