A Florida city agreed to pay $600,000 worth of bitcoin to hackers who took its computer systems offline with a cyberattack. Riviera Beach’s city council voted to pay the money after an attack in May affected the city’s online services, including email and 911 dispatches. The attack is part of a pattern that has targeted cities around the US. The disruption has cost millions of dollars. Sinéad Baker write in Business Insider that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned in 2018 that local-level governments around the U.S. were being hit with malware that is “among the most costly and destructive.”