The city of Palermo in southern Italy, with a population of 1.3 million, was forced to shut down all systems due to a cyber attack on Friday It is reported that, as the fifth most populous city in the country, the region welcomes nearly 2.3 million tourists every year. However, after the system went offline, the move had a huge impact on a wide range of operational services closely related to citizens and tourists.
Screenshot (from: Google search)
In the past three days, local IT experts (sispi) have been trying to restore the system. Unfortunately, to this day, all public services and portals in Palermo are still offline.
Many local media reports Said the current round of cyber attacks affected all municipal services, including public video surveillance and police action centers. Any communication or service request based on digital system can only be ignored at present.
Unfortunately, fortunately, citizens can at least handle corporate business through the old fax system. However, for tourists, they are still unable to book tickets to the museum and Massimo theater, or even confirm the facilities and services booked in advance.
Under the chaos, traffic restrictions and fines have become out of reach. As for whether the network attack is caused by extortion of software or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, it is not known at present.
Although it is reported recently that Italy has received a threat letter from killnet, a DDoS organization, it seems that the nature of extortion software is greater for the network attack against Palermo.
Innovation councillor of the city paolo petralia camassa Indicates that all systems have been carefully shut down and network isolation measures have been taken. However, he warned that the service interruption could continue for some time.
Since many infrastructure enterprises and government departments have handled similar extortion software network attacks before, taking the website server offline is obviously the most effective way to prevent further spread of malware and encrypt files.
Bleeping Computer It is pointed out that blackmail software attacks are usually accompanied by some form of data theft (double blackmail).
If so, Palermo may also be fined by the EU's general data protection regulation (gdpr) for serious data leakage.