The municipality of Palermo suffers major disruptions due to a ransomware attack

On Friday 3rd of June, the municipality of Palermo in Southern Italy suffered a cyberattack which resulted in a wide range of operations and services used by both citizens and visiting tourists being impacted. The systems have remained offline for the past three days even though local IT experts have been trying to restore the systems. According to multiple local media outlets, the impacted systems include the public video surveillance management, the municipal police operations center, and all the municipality’s services.

This has led to issues with communicating or requesting any service that relies on digital systems, and therefore all contact with the public offices are having to be made through fax machines.

Paolo Petralia Camassa, the councillor responsible for innovation in the municipality, has stated that all systems were cautiously shut down and isolated from the network in response to the incident.