Mayor Wegner's refusal to pay is right, but this ransomware attack — which disrupted housing benefit services and may have exposed huge amounts of personal data — lays bare years of underinvestment and fragmentation in municipal IT and demands immediate public investment in robust cybersecurity, transparent notification and support for affected residents, independent audits (including of election systems), and coordinated international action to dismantle criminal ransomware networks rather than privatize security through ransom payments.