According to Reuters City officials in some departments have lost years of digital work.
One compromised city computer seen by Reuters showed multiple corrupted documents with “weapologize” and “imsorry” added to file names.
Nearly 6 million people live in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The Georgia city itself is home to more than 450,000 people, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
City officials told Reuters that police files and financial documents were rendered inaccessible by unknown hackers who demanded $51,000 worth of bitcoin to provide digital keys to unlock scrambled files.
On March 22 one city official turned on her computer to find she was hit by a powerful computer virus known as SamSam that renamed all of her files deeming them unreadable.
According to reuters one office lost 8 of 10 computers because of this attack.
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