Italian City of Palermo Shuts Down All Systems To Fend Off Cyberattack (bleepingcomputer.com) 11
Palermo in Southern Italy, home to about 1.3 million people, has shut down all its services, public websites, and online portals following a cyberattack on Friday. BleepingComputer reports: It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public offices. Moreover, tourists cannot access online bookings for tickets to museums and theaters (Massimo Theater) or even confirm their reservations on sports facilities. Finally, limited traffic zone cards are impossible to acquire, so no regulation occurs, and no fines are issued for relevant violations. Unfortunately, the historical city center requires these passes for entrance, so tourists and local residents are severely impacted.
Italy recently received threats from the Killnet group, a pro-Russian hacktivist who attacks countries that support Ukraine with resource-depleting cyberattacks known as DDoS (distributed denial of service). While some were quick to point the finger at Killnet, the cyberattack on Palermo bears the signs of a ransomware attack rather than a DDoS. The councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo, Paolo Petralia Camassa, has stated that all systems were cautiously shut down and isolated from the network while he also warned that the outage might last for a while.
Italy recently received threats from the Killnet group, a pro-Russian hacktivist who attacks countries that support Ukraine with resource-depleting cyberattacks known as DDoS (distributed denial of service). While some were quick to point the finger at Killnet, the cyberattack on Palermo bears the signs of a ransomware attack rather than a DDoS. The councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo, Paolo Petralia Camassa, has stated that all systems were cautiously shut down and isolated from the network while he also warned that the outage might last for a while.
Faximum (Score:4, Funny)
>"It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public office"
See, fax machines CAN be useful.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, given the services this office normally provides, were you referring to fax machines or the large group of humans currently reliant on them?
Just wondering how morbid your curiosity for death really is here.
Re: (Score:1)
Most modern fax machines probably have IOT connections (for dubious reasons) and are thus also hackable via internet.
Re:Faximum (Score:4, Informative)
>"It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public office"
See, fax machines CAN be useful.
Moreover, fax machines are digital systems, at least the ones made since the turn of the century. That's why typical fax images looked jagged, like a magnified GIF avatar. Maybe what the author of the article meant was Internet-enabled systems. BTW faxes are still popular in Japan, where paper copies are a must in formal transactions.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt that a fax machine allows firmware access via the call data (fax datastream.) but even then it would require establish
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In this sense, fax was digital from the very beginning in the 1850ies, more than 150 years ago. Fax works by scanning the picture line by line and sending the line as a series of on- and off-signals.
Well, lots of modern technology still work line by line. It's not as if the "method" went out of fashion with the dot matrix printer.
Re: (Score:2)