The City Hall of Nagyvárad (Oradea) realized on Saturday that their IT system had been hit by a ransomware attack. Damage control and mitigation took place on Monday. According to the city hall, all lost data will be recovered and none of it fell into unwarranted hands.
The Nagyvárad City Hall informed the press on Monday that no operations can be carried out at the service counters, a room called the “Pyramid” by locals, except for the collection of fees and taxes because of the situation created by the ransomware attack, which encrypted some of the data.
According to the communiqué, 100% of the data will be recovered from the backup files, but the restoration itself will take a while. Until the restoration of all data is complete, the CID document management system will not be operational.
Nagyvárad’s city manager, Mihai Jurca, told Bihari Napló that some data of the city hall’s IT system was encrypted by the ransomware attack, with the hackers asking for money to make them accessible again.
“We do not have a problem because we have daily backups, so the data that got encrypted on Saturday can be recovered from Friday’s backup.”
– said Mihai Jurca, who added: “We followed the security protocol when the problem was detected and changed the passwords and shut down the servers.“
According to Jurca, every single computer in the city hall is being checked before restoring the backup files. He emphasized that no data got out of their system nor fell into unwarranted hands. The ransomware damaged certain files, but these can be recovered from the backups. He also mentioned that they reported the attack to the police, asking them to figure out where the cyberattack came from.
“Our databases are being attacked daily, but this was a
more complex attack; still, I think by the afternoon, we will return
to normal activity.”
– he said.
UPDATE: City hall informed the public on their webpage that all affected operations on the ground floor had resumed Tuesday morning and all data had been fully recovered from the backup.
Title image: The service counters at Nagyvárad’s City Hall, a room called the “Pyramid.” (Photo: Primăria Oradea Facebook)
