The city of Oakland, California, declared a state of emergency on Tuesday following a ransomware attack last week.
“The City of Oakland recently learned of a ransomware attack. The City and its Information Technology Department (ITD) followed industry best practices to assess the scope and severity of the issue and develop a response plan. doing.” I have written Interim City Administrator Harold Duffy.
“The core functions such as 911 remain the same [but] As a precautionary measure, ITD is working to take certain non-emergency systems offline to safely protect and restore services, which may cause delays to City services. ”
On Wednesday, the city issued a new update, saying it continues to implement recovery plans to restore affected systems as quickly and safely as possible.
“The network outage impacted a number of non-emergency systems such as collecting payments, processing reports, issuing permits and licenses,” he said. Latest blog post On the City of Auckland website.
“As a result, some buildings are closed. We encourage the public to email the service counters they wish to visit before coming to any city building.”
According to cybersecurity expert Erfan Shadabi: Comfort AGthis ransomware incident highlights the harsh realities that can affect government agencies.
“A ransomware attack is an imminent, likely event rather than a remote possibility,” said Shadavi. Information security on mail. “The threat actors behind these attacks are primarily intent on disrupting operations, encrypting critical operational data, and generally wreaking havoc on the delivery of government services.”
To stay safe from these threats, Chris Clements, vice president of solution architecture, said: Cerberus Sentinelsays municipalities need to adopt a true cybersecurity culture, not just buy the latest cybersecurity products.
“An effective cybersecurity culture […] We stick to the principles and explain all aspects,” Clements said. Information security on mail.
“[These include] Proactive system and application hardening, minimizing the attack surface, continuous monitoring that may indicate the presence of an attacker, and regular vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.”
At the time of this writing, no attackers have claimed responsibility for the attack on the city of Oakland’s infrastructure.
The incident came days after ransomware gang LockBit. Conversation log published Following an attack on the company, between its operator and Royal Mail.
