Quebec region pays $30,000 Bitcoin ransom after servers hacked

MONTREAL — On Sept. 10, municipal employees in a region between Montreal and Quebec City arrived at work to discover a threatening message on their computers notifying them they were locked out of all their files.

In order to regain access to its data, the regional municipality of Mekinac was told to deposit eight units of the digital currency Bitcoin into a bank account — roughly equivalent to $65,000.

Mekinac’s IT department eventually negotiated the cyber extortionists down and paid $30,000 in Bitcoin, but not before the region’s servers were disabled for about two weeks.

The attack highlights a glaring weakness in government servers in Quebec, according to Professor Jose Fernandez, a professor and malware expert at the Polytechnique Montreal engineering school.

“Quebec…