Housing

CityLab Daily: When Hackers Shut the City Down

Also: The fight to kick a car race out of a Detroit park, and why some city pools still have gender-segregated swimming.
Stephanie Keith/Reuters

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Hack job: Three weeks ago, the city of Baltimore got locked out of its computers. In a ransomware attack, hackers are demanding $100,000 in Bitcoin to regain access to multiple city servers (Baltimore Sun). As a result, the city has reverted back to working in person for some city services, creating manual workarounds for real estate transactions, for example. But other systems remain frozen, including a portal for water bill payments and government email and phones. The attack is one of more than 20 made on municipalities this year (NPR).