New Orleans has declared a state of emergency after their computer systems were infected with ransomware.
New Orleans city government computers were shut down and the mayor declared a state of emergency after a suspected cyberattack.
Ransomware was detected on the Big Easy’s system, forcing the government to take its computers offline and close city offices on Friday. The city government’s website, Nola.gov, remained down Saturday morning.
The city found no sign that any passwords were compromised or data lost in the attack, Nola.com reported, but city workers had an influx of suspicious emails, which forced the systems to remain offline.
New Orleans’ experience with hurricanes is actually an asset in a situation like this, said Collin Arnold, New Orleans’ homeland security director. “One positive about being a city that has been touched by disasters,” he said, “is our plans and our activities reflect the fact that we can operate without the internet and without a city network.”
The FBI, the Secret Service and National Guard are working with city and Louisiana state investigators. Officials said public safety services are still up and running, and City Hall offices will go back to pen and paper to continue doing business.
The city had not received any ransom demands as of Friday afternoon, according to the Associated Press.
Several other cities have had their operations crippled as a result of ransomware and other cyber attacks. Pensacola, Baltimore and Atlanta are other notable recent examples.
The attack follows others that targeted and sometimes crippled government system around the country. The city of Pensacola, Florida, was hit by a ransomware attack, with the hackers seeking $1 million, the day after a gunman killed three sailors at a Navy base there.
In May, hackers crippled Baltimore’s systems, taking several of the city’s servers hostage. A similar attack paralyzed Atlanta’s city government computers in March.
This is going to become a growing problem in the future.
We have already seen several cases of a large municipality being brought to its knees because of ransomware and a variety of cyber attacks.
For some insane reason the “geniuses” in government, most of who are in the boomer age demographic, thought it’d be a good idea to put all sorts of critical infrastructure on the Internet. These are also the same people who have been obsessed with putting data into the “cloud” which largely consists of servers and services run by Amazon and Microsoft. They have done these things so they didn’t have to hire as many millennial-aged engineers and administrators to manage on-premise infrastructure.
So basically in order to save a minimal amount of money, they willfully decided to make systems that are critical to the function of government highly vulnerable. What we are seeing play out is proof of how vulnerable these systems are.
For now these attacks have been contained to just city governments, but just imagine the chaos that would occur if this type of thing hit systems that manage social security or EBT payments. Such a situation could potentially result in riots and mass chaos in the streets.
