Tag Archive for: florida

$1.1 million in two weeks – Florida cities pay out big to ransomware gangs

Cybercriminals have learnt something very valuable in the last couple of weeks: in order to regain access to their data, cities in Florida are prepared to pay out huge Bitcoin ransoms to hackers.

Read more in my article on the Tripwire State of Security blog.

Graham Cluley

Florida city will pay hackers $600,000 to get its computer systems back – The Washington Post

  1. Florida city will pay hackers $ 600,000 to get its computer systems back  The Washington Post
  2. Florida city will pay hackers $ 600K to get computer system back  The Mercury News
  3. Riviera Beach ransomware attack: Florida city pays $ 600,000 to hackers who seized its computer system  CBS News
  4. Small Florida City Agrees To Pay $ 600,000 To Hackers Who Paralyzed Its Networks  HuffPost
  5. City pays $ 600K ransom to save computer records  ABC News
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FCC says carriers failed Florida after hurricane—but lets them off the hook

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

The Federal Communications Commission isn’t punishing carriers for their horrible response to Hurricane Michael in Florida, despite a commission investigation finding that the carriers’ mistakes prolonged outages caused by the hurricane.

Mobile carriers’ response to the hurricane was so bad that even FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—who normally avoids any criticism of the industry he’s paid to regulate—called it “completely unacceptable” in October 2018. Outages left many customers without cell service for more than a week, as Verizon and others struggled to restore service.

Pai initiated an investigation and released the FCC Public Safety Bureau’s resulting report yesterday. The report recommends changes that carriers can make to improve future hurricane responses, and Pai said he is “call[ing] on wireless phone companies, other communications providers, and power companies to quickly implement the recommendations contained in this report.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Florida utility to close natural gas plants, build massive solar-powered battery

Rows of solar panels under a cloudy sky.

Enlarge / Solar panels in Arcadia, Florida. (credit: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)

On Thursday, Florida Power and Light (FPL) announced that it would retire two natural gas plants and replace those plants with what is likely to be the world’s largest solar-powered battery bank when it’s completed in 2021.

FPL, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, serves approximately 10 million customers in Florida. The utility says its plan, including additional efficiency upgrades and smaller battery installations throughout its service area, will save customers more than $ 100 million in aggregate through avoided fuel costs. FPL also says its battery and upgrade plan will help avoid 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The plan calls for the construction of a 409 megawatt (MW) / 900 megawatt-hour battery installation at what will be called the FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center. For context, the largest battery installation in the world was built by Tesla at a Hornsdale wind farm in South Australia; that has a capacity and power rating of 100 MW / 129 MWh.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica