California City Declares State of Emergency After Cyberattack (nbcbayarea.com) 19
NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council "declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations."
"Malicious software infected and compromised" the East Bay community's information technology systems beginning about 5:45 a.m. Friday, the city said on social media. "The cybersecurity incident hit critical public safety operations, including 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and city services," the city said.
"There is no imminent threat to the public," the city said. "All public safety services remain active." The city shut down its computer network "to contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation," it said... Suisun City dispatchers were taking calls for service through the Solano County dispatch center. Suisun City police officers and firefighters continued responding to calls for service, the city said, but online city services and internal operations were unavailable.
On Facebook the city said it was "working alongside federal, state and regional agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and California Office of Emergency Services to maintain emergency services, investigate the incident and restore systems."
But Bay Area PBS station KQED notes "They're only the latest local government in the region to be hit by a cyberattack." Earlier this year, Foster City and Pittsburg experienced other cyberattacks that impacted services in their own jurisdictions. Foster City declared a state of emergency after a March ransomware incident that shut down many services for more than a week. Pittsburg lost almost $1 million to a February phishing attack, though over half of it was recovered.
"There is no imminent threat to the public," the city said. "All public safety services remain active." The city shut down its computer network "to contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation," it said... Suisun City dispatchers were taking calls for service through the Solano County dispatch center. Suisun City police officers and firefighters continued responding to calls for service, the city said, but online city services and internal operations were unavailable.
On Facebook the city said it was "working alongside federal, state and regional agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and California Office of Emergency Services to maintain emergency services, investigate the incident and restore systems."
But Bay Area PBS station KQED notes "They're only the latest local government in the region to be hit by a cyberattack." Earlier this year, Foster City and Pittsburg experienced other cyberattacks that impacted services in their own jurisdictions. Foster City declared a state of emergency after a March ransomware incident that shut down many services for more than a week. Pittsburg lost almost $1 million to a February phishing attack, though over half of it was recovered.
Re: (Score:2)
There is little in the way of resources on the state or federal level to assist local government in establishing and managing an effective IT and SecOps department.
A persistent global threat should not be shuffled off onto the responsibility of city councils and county boards of supervisors.
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Microsoft is running it.
I was watching some old episodes of Forensic Files and you could see the 911 system was running OpenVMS.
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So much stupid (Score:2)
Get your public infrastructure off the Internet. You idiots were warned back in the 90's that this was a terrible idea.
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If it runs Windows, it might not be able to run without contacting the mother ship (license servers). This is a small town. They probably don't have the IT staff to manage things like enterprise license and update servers.
Back in the '90s, it was someone visiting each PC with a stack of floppies. You can't even run a home PC that way anymore.
Just a guess. (Score:1)
Oh no! (Score:2)
Suisun City (population: 29,518)
How will someone report the traffic signal going out?
American governance systems are so odd (Score:2)
Why on earth would a small town (30k population!) be the right scale of organisation to run all this stuff? The UK is massively over-centralised, but it's still better as an approach than this. The smallest unit of government here is a town council, which goes up to 40k people, and all it has powers to do is manage things like parks, playgrounds, community halls, cemeteries, allotments, and bus shelters. Next level up is the district / borough / unitary council, up to 400k, and their powers are still limite
Correction (Score:2)
Unitary authorities in the UK run up to 1.2 million, Birmingham.
To complete the picture police and fire services are run at the level above - thus Birmingham is policed by West Midland Police.
The scary thing is that if those police systems collapsed there'd be no easy fall back as this case showed they did have.
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The tension between local and central is eternal, but I'll never understand the attraction of pushing coercive state power down to hyper-local level:
That's the beauty of each state being allowed to have the governance model that its citizens want. Don't like it? You can exercise your freedom of speech and right to vote, or you can move to another state. In some states, like Ohio, governance is carved up into tiny pieces - State -> Counties -> Townships -> Cities / Villages.
You may have a village of 1,000 people, with its own tiny town hall for the mayor, its own fire department, 3 person police department, school system (that can pretty much ma
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I understand the *theory*, in the same way I understand the *theory* of the second amendment. But just like I cannot look on with anything other than horror and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of the theory being implemented for 2A, so I cannot look on with anything other than dismay and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of having small settlements run their own police departments.
And obviously, while the citizenry of a place can, in general and in principle, vote the bastards out, or up stick
Credit where credit is due (Score:2)
The decision to ensure that 911 services could be run by the county is the local system collapsed shows solid contingency planning.
Confusing headline (Score:2)
I took the headline to mean the actual place called California City [wikipedia.org] had been hacked.
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"Suisun, CA" has fewer chars than "California City." They coulda saved ink.
idyllic (Score:2)
Suisun City is FAR from idyllic. Lots of crime.