Capital of Italy Sicily, Palermo city suffered a cyber attack on last Friday, which led to an enormous impact on municipal services and operations involving both citizens and tourists.
Public video surveillance administration, the municipal police operations center, and the entirety of the city’s municipal services are all said to be affected, according to media reports. Communication with public services related to digital systems relies on out-of-date fax machines.
Tourists in the city are unable to make online reservations for theater and museum tickets, or confirm reservations for sporting facilities. Their access to the city center is denied for the lack of traffic zone cards as the entrance passes.
Despite the efforts of local IT specialists over the days to restore the systems, all services, public websites, and online portals remain unavailable.
Home to 1.3 million inhabitants, Palermo is among the top tourist destinations in both Italy and Europe with estimated 2.3 million tourists every year.
This ransomware attack shows no sign of DDoS cyberattack from Killnet group, a Russian cybercrime group who recently threated attacks against countries supporting Ukraine. But the outage may continue, according to the official, because all network-related systems are shut down for caution.
However, things are no any better if the attack is linked to ransomware, the perpetrators may have been able to steal vast amounts of data in order to carry out double-extortion. Palermo could be subjected to a major data breach as a result of this, as well as sanctions for violating the GDPR.
We may anticipate a rise in the frequency of such attacks as the world becomes increasingly connected, linking more services and information systems to the internet. With the prevalence of smart cities and connected automobiles, ransomware gangs are becoming more interested in this infrastructure.
This is a typical example of how cybercrime affects our daily lives, and it is very concerning that a hacker attack can bring the whole city to a standstill in peacetime. Enhancing cybersecurity has never been so significant because cybercriminals target not only companies but public sectors as well.
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