A Florida city reportedly has fired one of its top tech
employees after officials were forced to pay $460,000 in ransom
to the hackers behind a cyber attack that disabled its servers,
phones and email accounts.

Brian Hawkins, Lake City's director of information technology,
was let go from his job Monday, about three weeks after the
hackers' malware compromised the city's computer network,
according to WCJB.

“Our city manager did make a decision to terminate one employee
and he is revamping our whole IT department to comply with what
we need to be able to overcome what happened... so it doesn't
happen again,” Mayor Stephen Witt told the station.

Staff initially tried to restore the networks themselves
following the ransomware attack, but failed. Lake City council
members, at an emergency meeting last week, ultimately agreed to
pay 42 Bitcoins (around $460,000) to the hacker in exchange for
a decryption key that would get its networks back online. The
city's IT team and a third party vendor, WCJB reports, told them
it was their only resort.

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/florida...es-it-director
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