Ransomware hits government offices across the country

A company that handles unemployment claims and job placement for state governments has been hit by a cyberattack, which has disrupted online services across the country.

The departments of labor and related agencies have been affected in nine states, as well as Washington, D.C.

Geographic Solutions, based in Florida, said in an emailed statement that the outages were due to anomalous activity on our network, and that it was still investigating what happened. It didn't answer questions about whether ransomware was behind the attack.

Its website didn't load as of Thursday afternoon. An archived version of the site said 35 states and territories use its products.

But those states and Washington say they have been informed by the company about the cyberattack and that it has caused problems with government services.

The state Department of Labor and Workforce Development announced Tuesday that approximately 12,000 people are not receiving unemployment benefits because of the outage. A spokesman said that around 11,000 people who are currently filing continued claims through the state's workforce commission aren't receiving them.

In Nebraska, the outage means that some residents who receive unemployment payments through an online system, called NEworks, will only be paid once the NEworks website is back online, the state Department of Labor has announced. Some states are temporarily relaxing the eligibility requirements for claimants to receive unemployment benefits. The workarounds that are not required for claimants to prove they are searching for work have been created by the Iowa Workforce Development, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and the California Employment Development Department.

The attack has made several local government functions in Washington inoperable, including the district's paid family leave, which provides payments for city workers with a new child, a child on the way or a sick relative. A spokesman said that 750 families haven't been paid for claims they filed last week, and recipients are currently unable to file new claims.

Missouri s Department of Higher Education Workforce Development doesn't use Geographic Solutions for unemployment payments, but it does for a state job matching service, which has been down since Monday.

It isn't clear what type of cyberattack hit Geographic Systems, but it states descriptions of them strongly indicate it's ransomware, said Allan Liska, a Ransomware analyst at Recorded Future.

He said that this attack has all of the hallmarks of a ransomware attack.

When an issue is technical, a company will communicate that quickly, while in cases of a cyberattack, especially ransomware triage and communication generally take a lot longer, he said.

It is not clear when exactly the attack took place, but several states and Washington said Geographic Solutions told them about it Sunday evening. Many people are not available to respond to the attacks because of the fact that they tend to happen over a weekend or a holiday.

Ransomware attacks, in which criminal hackers encrypt a computer network or threaten to publish sensitive files unless the victim pays a bounty, are a constant threat to American businesses and other organizations. One study found that at least 14 billion dollars were received in payments from criptocurrencies used in attacks last year.