City of Oakland Declares State of Emergency After Ransomware Attack

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Oakland has declared a local state of emergency because of the impact of a ransomware attack that forced the City to take all its IT systems offline on February 8th. Interim City Administrator G. Harold Duffey declared (PDF) a state of emergency to allow the City of Oakland to expedite orders, materials and equipment procurement, and activate emergency workers when needed. "Today, Interim City Administrator, G. Harold Duffey issued a local state of emergency due to the ongoing impacts of the network outages resulting from the ransomware attack that began on Wednesday, February 8," a statement issued today reads. The incident did not affect core services, with the 911 dispatch and fire and emergency resources all working as expected.

While last week's ransomware attack only impacted non-emergency services, many systems taken down immediately after the incident to contain the threat are still offline. The ransomware group behind the attack is currently unknown, and the City is yet to share any details regarding ransom demands or data theft from compromised systems. "The City's IT Department is working with a leading forensics firm to perform an extensive incident response and analysis, as well as with additional cybersecurity and technology firms on recovery and remediation efforts," the statement said. "This continues to be an ongoing investigation with multiple local, state, and federal agencies involved."

Which Oakland?

[Jerrry]

Neither the /. article or the linked article say which Oakland...

Is this about Oakland, California? Oakland, Alabama? Oakland, Kansas? Half the states in the country have a city named Oakland.

Re:Which Oakland?

[Adambomb]

California
https://www.oaklandca.gov/news... [oaklandca.gov]

Re:

[HiThere]

Maybe they'd already decided not to pay. Oakland isn't a rich city.

Re:

[dstwins]

Oakland is richer than most think.. but federal policy (and most states) is to not pay ransom money because once you get known for paying out, you become the sucker for every 2 bit crook on the planet. So they COULD pay, but certainly won't pay.

Re:

[Time-L0rd]

Its not that hard to run the malware in cuckoo sandbox, figure out how it works and write a patch. My grandma is faster then these guys. The problem is they wont make the malware public so we can study in a timely matter.

Re:

[geekmux]

Neither the /. article or the linked article say which Oakland...

Is this about Oakland, California? Oakland, Alabama? Oakland, Kansas? Half the states in the country have a city named Oakland.

The unnamed one would be the infamous one. Obviously.

Help Computer

[TwistedGreen]

Stop all the downloading

More non-techy low content clickbait

[couchslug]

No technical details renders the story useless and pointless so why was it worthy of Slashdot?

We know why. SEO.

Good News Everyone!

[youngone]

Finally! A legitimate use for crypto currency.

Re:

[gweihir]

Habe you been living under a stone? Crapcoins are the only reason ransomware is now a massive problem. Money-laundering in other ways does not nearly work well enough, but washing criminal proceeds using crapcoins is the one major real world "business case" use crapcoins have.

Re:

[youngone]

Whoosh!

Re:

[groobly]

Correct. Likely a case of affirmative action inaction. While collecting a nice paycheck.

Fire them all

[gavron]

There's no reason the City of [name your city, but Oakland here] needs to have its filesystems available on the Internet.

Fire everyone who set this "convenience" up, and hire ITSEC people to set up VPNs so authenticated users from authenticated source locations can do their jobs. What? You're traveling? Can't access your files? That's part of the cost to pay for security. Either your files are globally accessible and you're fucked like Oakland, or they're not, and you're not.

Next thing someone will get a call from The Big Boss and wire funds to random idiots. Oh wait, they do.

Fire the idiots.

Re:

[kungfool]

Sorry, but in your fantasy, a city of half a million people has to have its IT infrastructure bolted down down so tight that when the city managers are at national meetings they can't have access to their work ? Have you ever worked in a real business or a real government ? I doubt any city of any size could function without remote access.

Re:

[gavron]

It's not about my resume, but thanks for asking. Yes, I have the chops and have done this job for governmental organizations bigger than Oakland.

If all the managers want to go to a meeting and the city can't function than they are already in need of being replaced by managers who stay and do their job and alternate "management retreats" or whatever golf excuse is.

Stop making excuses for incompetence in management. If they all left AND if they are required for the "city to function" then they should be fir

Re:

[kungfool]

Ya, "golf excuses" like policing practices seminars and federal funding congressional meetings. And I have a few chops as well. Like Sys Admin for FileNet servers for a 10,000 employee company and happening to live in Oakland. The problem isn't managers who need remote access, the problem is admins who don't maintain strict control of access to their systems. Granted, even with strict user access, shit can happen, the trick is to try and limit the shit and have a practiced recovery plan.

Synners Is Now

[Gilmoure]

Heh, re-reading Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991) and this headline reads like something ripped straight from the dataline.