On Friday, there was a cyberattack on the municipality of Palermo in Southern Italy. There has been a huge impact on its operations and services which caters to citizens and visiting tourists.
The city is home to 1.3 million people, making it the fifth most populated city in Italy. Not only that, it’s a tourist hotspot and welcomes nearly 2.3 million tourists every year.
According to the local IT experts, they have been doing their best to restore the systems for the past three days. In the meanwhile, most services, online portals, and public websites are unavailable for use.
Multiple local media outlets say the impacted systems include the municipal police operations center, public video surveillance management and most of the services in the municipal.
Communicating or requesting any service over the digital system is pointless at the moment. To reach out to public offices, citizens have to rely on obsolete fax machines.
Furthermore, the tourists have no access to book tickets to theatres (Massimo theatre) and museums. They aren’t even able to confirm their reservations for sports facilities.
Worse of all, limited traffic zone cards cannot be issued so the regulations are not being followed, nor are any fines for violation of rules. Given that the city center requires such passes at the entrance, tourists and residents are having a hard time.
Killnet, a pro-Russian hacktivist recently threatened Italy. It’s a cybergroup that has been attacking countries which support Ukraine through DDoS (distributed denial of service) resulting in resource depletion.
People were quick to blame Killnet for the attack on Palermo, however, the cyberattack carries the telltale signs of ransomware rather than a DDoS.
Paolo Petralia Camassa, the councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo said that all the systems were shut down and isolated from the rest of the network. He also gave a heads up that the outage will last a bit longer.
Such a response is typical for a ransomware attack. Most of the networks are shut down to prevent the malware from spreading to other systems and corrupting files.
In case the cyberattack was actually ransomware, the hackers could have gotten their hands on confidential data that they can hold as leverage to demand a ransom, that’s how most ransomware attacks are carried out.
If that happens, Palermo will be in big trouble for they’d have to deal with the severe data breach which can possibly affect a number of individuals both local and international. The municipal may also incur fines for violating GDPR policies.
SISIPI was the company which responded to the incident and performs IT restoration services. If there’s a follow-up for the incident, it’ll report.
In the meanwhile, tourists and residents continue to suffer from the lack of digital facilities which may or may not affect the number of tourists visiting the city in the future, unless proper measures are adopted to overcome such attacks.
