Cyber theft

Anyone else notice the story the other day that revealed 114 Arkansas communities have been struck by cyberattacks over the past two years? I darn near swallowed my coffee the wrong way when I read that number.

I could understand four, perhaps even six or seven, but 114 towns of our state’s 502 incorporated cities and towns?

According to the Arkansas Municipal League, which keeps track of such numbers affecting our communities, it’s a fact evidenced by the 2019 attack on little Clarendon, population 1,450, that lost a whopping $92,000 at the hands of cyber thieves operating from another state.

Siphoning that much money from an already tight $5 million annual budget understandably wreaked immediate financial hardship on every aspect of city government.

Mayor Jim Stinson said it felt like someone had smacked him and knocked the wind flat out of him. He also wondered how his community would recover from the theft.

Someone explain to me again why abandoning good old-fashioned paper, ink and file drawers in favor of putting our lives and businesses into the easily hackable Internet constitutes progress.

It seems there are two basic ways these Internet criminals use computers to steal from the treasuries of big cities and small towns. In Clarendon’s case, the thief or thieves got their hands on an electronic check and used it to counterfeit another made payable to themselves.

That particular scheme routinely goes like this: The criminal obtains a check or money order; even an electronic copy will do. Then it’s simple enough to create and cash a counterfeit version.

“It is certainly a problem,” Allen Bryant, special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service in Little Rock, told Democrat-Gazette reporter Tony Holt. “There are constant cyberattacks happening like that all across the country.”

Somehow I doubt that information provided a dime’s worth of solace for Clarendon’s mayor, who said he’s heard nothing from investigators as he continues grappling with the effects of the stolen funds.

The preferred method of cyber swindlers across America has been to employ ransomware. Just as it sounds, that’s where an employee one day clicks on a seemingly innocuous link that immediately exposes the user’s computer (and whatever network it’s linked with) to a malware virus.

That triggers a pop-up notification window saying their computer system has been hijacked. In order to get the compromised software functioning normally again, the victim has to deposit ransom in the form of untraceable bitcoin with the hijackers. A single bitcoin is said to currently translate to about $9,800 in cash.

Recently, such attacks have affected big and small city governments alike, although cyber criminals lately have narrowed their focus to municipalities with fewer resources. They also aim at cities with a greater temptation to pay the ransom, according to Stephen Addison, dean of science and math at the University of Central Arkansas and an expert on cybersecurity.

“What these [criminals] have learned is that small towns tend to have outdated systems,” Addison told Holt. The cities “have hired people who learned on the job. They tend to have old equipment.”

One of the highest-profile cyberattacks on a major city occurred in March 2018 when hackers demanded $51,000 worth of bitcoin from Atlanta for the release of its encrypted data.

The following year, the city’s information management director asked the city for $9.5 million to help pay recovery costs from that attack, according to Reuters.

Addison explained in the news account that larger cities can more readily absorb exorbitant recovery costs as opposed to smaller towns like Clarendon. That’s why there are cases across the country in which ransom is paid.

I don’t know about you, valued reader, but I can’t help but imagine some unshaven slob in a tattered bathrobe sitting at his kitchen table over a cup of lukewarm coffee, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he fires off one piece of ransomware after another while copying another town’s check to cash in his determination to remain a millionaire criminal.

Good for Guv

It was appropriate for four conservation-oriented clubs, societies and alliances who banded together to recognize Gov. Asa Hutchinson for protecting our Buffalo National River through his actions last year that used $6.2 million in state and conservation funds to buy out the controversial C&H Hog Farms that set up shop six miles upstream of the river in 2012.

This was a well-deserved honor for our governor who, after six years of facing a difficult decision politically, finally took the right step in a terrible situation that our state’s Department of Environmental Quality (cough) should never have allowed to happen on former Gov. Mike Beebe’s watch.

Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.

—–––––❖–––––— Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master’s journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.