Our view: In ransomware attack, a warning to municipalities and individuals

The City of Racine got its first taste of cyberattacks this month, and it’s been an altogether unpleasant experience.

The city’s computers were infected with a ransomware virus — although no ransom was demanded — which crippled internal online networks and voicemail systems, took down the city’s website for several days, caused meetings to be canceled and prevented citizens from contacting departments by email and from paying fines and conducting business with the city — unless they went to City Hall and did it the old-fashioned way: by cash or check.

Work continues to scrub servers, cleanse the computer system and get things back on track — but that’s taking a while. And it doubtlessly will cost a lot to fix both in terms of repair work and lost employee productivity and inconvenience.

Racine is not alone in being targeted by computer ransom attacks. Racine was hit on Jan. 31, one day after the City of Oshkosh suffered a similar attack from an implanted computer virus. The Oshkosh attack, which also crippled that city’s computers, has been blamed by the FBI on Russian hackers; officials don’t believe that’s the case with the attack in Racine, saying only that it came from out of the area.