For three weeks, the town halls of several cities of Seine-Saint-Denis have been using the means at hand to provide public service after a major computer attack.
On the night of December 5 to 6, a ransomware attack, which encrypts data and demands the payment of a large ransom to restore access, hit the servers of the Syndicat intercommunal d’Informatique (SII) of Bobigny, including depend on several municipalities and public bodies of the department.
Administration most exposed to contaminated infrastructure, the town hall of Bobigny had to disconnect its Internet access to try to limit the spread. Unable to turn on the computers, deprived of connection, its municipal employees found themselves cut off from the world.
DIY work
“We have a duty of continuity of the public service”, explained to AFP Rached Zehou, councilor delegated to Bobigny and president of the SII, while praising “the ingenuity” of the municipal agents in this crisis.
As municipal e-mail addresses no longer function, temporary Gmail boxes have been created to be able to communicate with the public. 4G boxes have been installed in certain priority services to allow them to access the Internet from laptops.
To obtain a birth or death certificate, residents must now go in person to the civil registry and can no longer complete the process online. Invoices for extracurricular activities can not be sent, nor the sums collected.
In La Courneuve, another city heavily impacted but less heavily than Bobigny, “we are finding solutions almost everywhere in the form of Excel tables, paper archiving or the use of other software”, declared his general manager of services Anthony Giunta.
In some municipalities, some professional software required for human resource management or town planning is inaccessible. As a result, hundreds of municipal officials could not receive their December pay as usual before Christmas, it will not be paid until a few days after.