Italian City of Palermo Shuts Down All Systems To Fend Off Cyberattack

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.

Faximum

[markdavis]

>"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.

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[TriCCer]

Please, god, no. Let it die!

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[geekmux]

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.

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[Tablizer]

Most modern fax machines probably have IOT connections (for dubious reasons) and are thus also hackable via internet.

Re:Faximum

[Catvid-22]

>"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.

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[nonBORG]

The question is if they are connected to the internet or not. There are lots of things that provide no connection or output only type connection and are therefore not hack-able without direct physical access. hacking without physical access is the only hacking of serious concern in most situations depending on the level of security and the value of what can be obtained by hacking.

I doubt that a fax machine allows firmware access via the call data (fax datastream.) but even then it would require establish

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[Sique]

Fax documents look that way because the print engines they use have a better resolution than the picture they are fed. Each pixel is scaled up to a square, and you get the artifactlike structures in your lines. The Group 3 standard most modern fax machines are using was introduced with the Infotec 6000 in 1974 and thus is close to 50 years old now.

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[Catvid-22]

Hm, doesn't pixel fit the definition of digital? Analog magnification tends to be blurry or splotchy, at least with film cameras.

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[Sique]

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. Later reincarnations introduced some simple compression, e.g. it was not sending e.g. 10 black pixels, 50 white pixels, 44 black pixels etc.pp.. Instead it send a series of bytes giving the number of pixels of the same color. In my example, fax sends 0x0A, 0x32, 0x2C... By definition, the odd numbered bytes are

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[Catvid-22]

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.

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[Sique]

The difference between "analog" and "digital" faxes is not the way the picture is encoded. Analog faxes send the signal on analog phone lines (PSTN), while digital faxes use ISDN for signalling. But on provider side, most lines are using VoIP anyway. Analog is only the last mile for stand alone faxes, or the line from the fax machine to the phone switch. If you are not careful and use compression on the digital line (e.g. G.729 or G.723 instead of G.711), an analog fax might not work, as its digital signal