City of Columbus Ransomware Attack Impacts 500,000 People

The City of Columbus, Ohio, is notifying 500,000 individuals that their personal information was stolen in a July 2024 ransomware attack.

The incident occurred on July 18 and resulted in the city taking systems offline as a containment measure, which impacted multiple services.

In late July, the city announced that the attack was stopped before file-encrypting ransomware could be deployed on its systems.

In early August, the city sued security researcher David Leroy Ross, also known as Connor Goodwolf, for telling the local media that the personal information of residents was stolen during the attack. The city’s officials previously said that only corrupted, unusable data had been exfiltrated.

Ross discovered that the Rhysida ransomware gang had leaked on its Tor-based website 3.1 terabytes of information supposedly exfiltrated from Columbus’ systems. The group claimed the theft of 6.5 terabytes of data and leaked the information after failing ...