U.S. and Spanish municipalities deal with outages caused by cyberattacks

The hackers have been training to target municipalities around the world, this time hitting several targets in the United States and Spain in recent weeks.

In the United States, Germantown, Tennessee, announced a ransomware attack that affected its company’s on-site servers on Friday afternoon. On Monday, the city of 41,000 people, about 30 minutes from Memphis, announced it had restored office phone lines. His WiFi in some government-run facilities is still down.

City officials first received word of the incident at 6 a.m. Friday and said in an earlier statement that the town’s “cybersecurity malware systems were immediately activated to contain the damage.”

“Initial assessments indicate that no data related to financial, utility, or payment information has been compromised. Preventive measures are being taken to minimize the impact of potential cybersecurity attacks. “These systems are intentionally cloud-based and hosted off-site,” they said.

“The impact will be minimal, but may result in delays in access to services such as issuing permits and responding to public records requests.”

The town did not respond to a request for comment about what happened to the affected servers, but the statement said the servers were “isolated” and all network computers were shut down. A temporary website has been created to pay utility bills and taxes, but the city said they can also pay in person at City Hall.

All fire and police services are still operational, including the city’s 911 system.

The FBI is assisting the town with the investigation, and incident responders are assisting with recovery efforts.

After 2023 saw a spate of devastating attacks on city, county, and state-level governments, 2024 has already seen multiple incidents.

Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is still struggling to recover from a ransomware attack that affected nearly every branch of government and caused a countywide outage.

attack of spain

Two Spanish towns, Teo and Sant Antoni de Portmany, also announced incidents in the past week that have resulted in restrictions on their functions and provision of services.

Both towns, which have fewer than 30,000 residents, turned to the National Center for Cryptography (CCN) for assistance, along with other law enforcement agencies.

The municipality of Sant Antoni de Portmany on the island of Ibiza announced that the ransomware attack was detected late Thursday night and has already restricted the work of municipal employees. Containment measures are being taken while the scope of the attack is analyzed.

“Our IT equipment remains paralyzed and we have informed our employees of the course of action until we analyze and resolve the situation,” the city said in a machine-translated statement.

“City Council encourages citizens to call before attending in person to confirm if the process is viable or if they will be able to attend on their appointed date.”

Mr Teo’s attack occurred on the afternoon of January 24 and “paralyzed administrative activities for several days afterwards”. The attack affected computers used at social services offices and Theo Women’s Resource Center.

The mayor and city council are coordinating recovery efforts with state authorities, the Spanish Data Protection Agency and the National Police Agency.

Jonathan Greig

Jonathan Greig is a breaking news reporter for Recorded Future News. Jonathan has been working all over the world as a journalist since 2014. Before he returned to New York City, he worked for news organizations in South Africa, Jordan, and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity for ZDNet and his TechRepublic.