Santee pays $603,000 to third-party company after ‘cybersecurity incident’

The city of Santee paid $603,000 to a third-party company following what it calls a “cybersecurity incident” on Aug. 20.

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

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

“They offer different services, like ransomware negotiation, payment facilitation, incident response and recovery assistance,” Nikolas Behar, assistant professor of cybersecurity at the University of San Diego, told NBC 7.

While Behar may not be privy to the specifics of this particular incident, he shared his impressions based on his experience. When asked about the city’s payment to the company, he said, “We have no way of knowing what they actually did with that money. Six hundred thousand dollars seems like a lot for an incident response, so not 100%, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of that money went to pay the ransomware team.”

Behar explained that hackers are often part of larger, highly organized organizations, much like the companies they attack, and are rarely in the United States. When it comes to who they choose to target, he said, they are constantly scanning the Internet for vulnerabilities and, when they find one, they hold the owner’s data hostage.

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

Behar added that if someone is concerned they may have been affected, he suggests freezing “their credit to prevent people from opening accounts in their name with personally identifiable information that could have been exposed.”

NBC 7 asked the city of Santee for more information about the incident, as well as details on what portion of the budget the $603,000 payment came from, but officials declined to share more information at this time.

This is a developing story.