A neighboring city of San Francisco with more than 400,000 inhabitants, Oakland suffered a ransomware attack a few days ago, which still paralyzes some of its services today.
The municipality of Oakland, California has been forced to declare a state of emergency due to a cyberattack. The city is still suffering the consequences on its systems and networks of the ransomware attack which hit it on the night of Wednesday February 8 and which began to produce its effects the next morning.
Non-emergency services taken offline
Ransomware continues to spread across the web, crippling entire cities. Hours after the attack, Oakland’s Information Technology Department (ITD) took care to disconnect several of its critical services to ensure they had not been impacted and could be revived without fear. 911 (the emergency number) and other fire and emergency resources are, fortunately, working normally.
As of February 10, the municipality warned its inhabitants that certain departments were going to be affected by delays. Indeed, non-emergency services, such as those allowing the payment of certain taxes and other taxes, or the service for paying parking fines and parking fees, were going to be taken offline. Other systems, devoted to issuing permits and licenses, have also been cut, with entire buildings closed.
On Tuesday, February 14, the City of Oakland’s communications team informed its citizens that it was working with a company specializing in cybercrime ” to mount a response and conduct in-depth incident analysis “. It also collaborates with other players in the cyber world to recover data, not to mention the collaboration of local and federal authorities and agencies.
State of emergency declared, and no information on the ransomware
The crisis reached a milestone when, on Wednesday February 15, the administrator in charge of the public works department Harold Duffey declared a local state of emergency ” due to ongoing impacts from network outages resulting from the ransomware attack “. The state of emergency should allow the city of Oakland to ensure a certain continuity of service and to accelerate the purchase of materials and equipment, the time to secure and restore its computer systems.
Local authorities were calling on residents on Thursday to file an online report for all non-urgent complaints. At the end of the day on February 16, the services we mentioned a little earlier had still not been relaunched. ” We will continue to update the public as we have more information to share. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work to safely restore affected systems. », promises the City Hall.
If the municipality has published many messages intended for the population in recent days, some residents would have difficulty reaching municipal services by telephone and are redirected to recorded messages. For the moment, however, nothing has filtered through on the consequences of the attack. The city does not communicate on the potential ransom demanded or on the extent of the damage with regard to the data stolen by the hackers.
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