The city of Johanneburg says its systems are slowing coming back up following last week’s ransomware attacks – and it has no intention of paying the 4-bitcoin ransom demanded.
Starting on Thursday 24 October, city employees attempting to log on to their computers were greeted with a message from a group calling itself the Shadow Kill Hackers.
“All your servers and data have been hacked,” the message read. “We have dozens of back doors inside your city. We have control of everything in your city. We also compromised all passwords and sensitive data such as finance and personal population information.”
Councillor Funzela Ngobeni, MMC responsible for group ICT, say the attack breached the network and allowed access to internal systems, had a significant impact on the city’s ability to deliver services.
So far some of the customer-facing systems have been brought back online, with work progressing on making e-services available as soon as possible.
With the call centre still down, the city is using social media to stay in touch with citizens.
Other systems that are still unavailable including building plans and town planning. However, Ngobeni is confident that 80% of systems will be back up and running soon.