A pair of ransomware attacks on sewage treatment plants in rural Maine communities demonstrates that small towns need to be just as vigilant as larger communities in protecting against hackers, local officials said.
The attacks occurred in April in Mount Desert and on the Fourth of July in Limestone, and no money was paid and no customer data was compromised, officials said Monday.
“It’s like an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys,” said Mount Desert Town Manager Durlin Lunt Jr. ”Fortunately, in this case, they didn’t get anything.”
In northern Maine, the town of Limestone was hit on a holiday.
Limestone Water and Sewer District Superintendent Jim Leighton said the control computer was hit with the ransomware attack.
The hackers couldn’t cause harm but the computer shutdown did take offline alarms to alert workers if pumps overheat or tanks are overfilled, he said.
In the end, the old, obsolete Windows 7 computer was due to be replaced anyway, he said, and it may have been a good thing because it caught the attention of rural water and sewage district operators in Aroostook County.
“It was a bad thing for us but a good thing for the county,” he said. “Everyone took notice and did things to their computers so they couldn’t be hit.”
Related: CISA Warns of Threat Posed by Ransomware to Industrial Systems
Related: CISA Adds Ransomware Module to Cyber Security Evaluation Tool
Related: Colonial Pipeline Confirms Personal Information Impacted in Ransomware Attack

More from Associated Press
- Big China Spy Balloon Moving East Over US, Pentagon Says
- China Says It’s Looking Into Report of Spy Balloon Over US
- Russian Millionaire on Trial in Hack, Insider Trade Scheme
- US Infiltrates Big Ransomware Gang: ‘We Hacked the Hackers’
- South Dakota’s Noem Says Cell Phone Number Hacked
- Learning to Lie: AI Tools Adept at Creating Disinformation
- Microsoft Invests Billions in ChatGPT-Maker OpenAI
- Mississippi Creates New Cyber Unit, Names 1st Director
Latest News
- Big China Spy Balloon Moving East Over US, Pentagon Says
- Former Ubiquiti Employee Who Posed as Hacker Pleads Guilty
- Cyber Insights 2023: Venture Capital
- Atlassian Warns of Critical Jira Service Management Vulnerability
- High-Severity Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Patched in VMware Workstation
- Exploitation of Oracle E-Business Suite Vulnerability Starts After PoC Publication
- China Says It’s Looking Into Report of Spy Balloon Over US
- GoAnywhere MFT Users Warned of Zero-Day Exploit
