Hackers demanded €750,000 from Dutch municipality in ransomware attack: report

A group of hackers that attacked the servers of the Overijssel municipality of Hof van Twente and took its backups for ransom, demanded 750 thousand euros from the municipality for the backups to be released, De Volkskrant reported after contact with the hackers.

The attack destroyed Hof van Twente's 24 virtual servers and the backups were taken hostage. The hackers claim they have 40 terabytes of backup files, including municipal information such as citizens' personal details.

The hack came to light last week when municipal employees were unable to log into the system. "It became clear that there are unknown third parties who have access to our systems and made the data on all of our servers inaccessible to us," a spokesperson for the municipality said at the time. The hack was reported to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the police.

The municipality and the police have not yet made contact with the hackers, according to De Volkskrant. The police first want to be further in their investigation and have an inventory of exactly what data is in the hands of the hackers, the newspaper wrote.