The state organization that manages Stone Mountain Park has fallen victim to a ransomware attack — similar to the kind that gripped city of Atlanta operations last year.
The Stone Mountain Memorial Association noticed the attack when one of their files wouldn’t open, spokesman John Bankhead said. In ransomware attacks, an entity typically holds a person’s or organization’s data hostage by encrypting them until a ransom is paid.
An executive at SMMA “figured out something was wrong [and] he shut the system down completely,” Bankhead said.
Bankhead stressed that the public is not impacted, and no sensitive data was compromised. He did not know how much money the attackers asked for.
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The association is working with the GBI and Georgia Technology Authority to reboot their system to get access again, Bankhead said. It might take several days, but that will allow SMMA to recover their files without paying the ransom.
“Everything was backed up,” he said.
The association is a self-supporting state authority that oversees the park through a public-private partnership.
More than a year ago, the city of Atlanta was hit with a ransomware attack that crippled its computer network for days. It took the city more than $2.7 million to recover from it, the AJC reported.
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