Palermo is a Southern Italian City that has recently been a victim of a Cyber attack. The incident was so drastic that it disrupted Municipal services. Tourists and residents suffer a lot due to this sudden ransomware attack.
Palermo is among the most popular Italian tourist cities. Annually 2.3 million tourists visit this city. Palermo has a total population of approximately 1.3 million people.
Due to the cyber attack many people lost communication with the city and could not access Digital Services. After the cyber attack services tried to restore the system but unfortunately public websites and portals were offline for a few days.
Citizens need Internet services to communicate with each other, many professions rely on digital systems even offices require online operations. Hence, the whole system collapsed because of the attack.
Details of the Italian City Palermo cyber attack
Many departments were affected because of the cyberattack in Palermo such as Digital Services, communication channels, Municipal, and police operations, CCTV footage management, and online bookings.
As digital systems were shut down tourists and residents could not access the digital facilities of public offices, so they had to use fax machines as a medium of communication.
The online system for all public offices was not working so there was no traffic rule in the area. The car system on traffic and speed limit was shot down and the authorities could not enforce penalties.
It could lead to drastic violations. As Palermo is a popular tourist City most of its sightseeing requires online booking of tickets which was impossible to do.
Russian cybercrime gang was even threatening the municipality of the City. Kill Not hacking group was the name of this cyber crime gang and it was targeting those countries who were supporting Ukraine.
The Russian cybercrime gang attacked the distributed Daniel of services DDOS. According to the attackers they are in a war against a fake Italian government. They also warned that they could destroy the digital systems of more than 8 other countries.
Palermo municipality innovation councillor, Paolo Petralia Camassa told the public that Restoration of municipal services can take longer than expected.
According to him the system is offline and the instability of the network due to the Cyber attack has created trouble for the officials. Although the municipal system was descriptive due to ransomware attacks, they were trying to restore the services by taking backup data and reconstructing the system.
Apart from Municipal services, all the other internet services of the city were deserted and the working system that was running on online services also became a victim of attack
To overcome the loss they created a small private network that could be provided to workstations. The situation was much alarming, indicating that the recovery of municipal services would take a lot of time.
The management worked with dedication and hired a whole IT team from the firm SISPI. They took backup data and recreated the whole system which can recover the disrupted services of the municipal.
Who Was Responsible For The Attack
A cybercrime gang took responsibility for the ransomware attack. They were even threatening the authorities that they would publish the stolen data online.
For any City or country, their data is critical. The attackers did not specify what kind of data they had stolen which was creating immense pressure on authorities.
The authorities of Palamu city did not have any word of confirmation did the attackers had access to personal data or not.
However, according to a few reports, the hacker stole sensitive data such as residence certificates, birth certificates, marriage certificates, and family certificates of citizens.
Still, the authorities were calming people by stating that they had taken the appropriate measures to control data violations.
It was the worst day that the hackers successfully violated Data Bridge and there was no protection of public data.
Even the government services were also lacking safety measures to protect the privacy of sectors and agencies.
Final Thoughts
If we assume that the Italian city cyberattack Palermo shuts all down is the worst that can happen to a city we are not wrong.
Even after that, restoring backup data and restoring services is another task for the authorities. For any City or country whose personal data is violated, it becomes a weakness for a lifetime when things are not reordered properly.
