THE Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality is battling to recover from a suspected cyberattack that has caused significant disruption to the Free State capital city’s information technology systems.
The breach is believed to have occurred in the early hours of 24 October.
Nearly a month later, the municipality’s computer systems have not been fully restored as yet.
“Unfortunately, all systems have been affected, but as a security and precautionary measure we needed to lock down the network as we were not sure if the threat agent was still able to access the network in any way,” Mangaung city manager Sello More told The Free Stater in an interview.
“This also meant that we were protecting any other computers from being affected by the security breach.”
More said although the metro’s financial system had been compromised, the municipality was still able to access customers’ accounts and to conduct transactions.
He said experts from information and communications technology company BCX had also helped the municipality to recover the functionality of its solar system.
“Our team worked tirelessly in conjunction with BCX to quickly re-establish the functionality of the solar system which is currently being operated in a clean (sanitised) and secure environment,” the city manager said.
“We have managed to also ensure that officials working on the financial system are also working from a clean room.
“Hence we are still able to transact and we able to have access to accounts of customers.
“Due the sensitivity and secrecy of personal data we are not taking this likely at all, hence we are ensuring that all access is restricted to key and critical personnel.”
More said the metro authority was working on an investigation with the South African Police Service (SAPS) and its organised and serious crime unit, better known as the Hawks.
“A case has been opened with SAPS and the Hawks have also been brought on board,” he said.
More is hopeful the probe will confirm the hackers behind the cyberattack.
“As this is an ongoing investigation we will only be able to answer once they have confirmed,” the city manager said.
“It is believed though that this was done through a phishing attack,” he added.
“It has to be understood that these criminals do this on a full-time basis and have a lot of loopholes that they use to their advantage.”
More said Mangaung was working with key stakeholders to upgrade the municipality’s information technology systems in an effort to guard against future breaches.
“We have already used this situation to our advantage as we have upgraded various servers to the latest versions of their operating systems,” he said.
“This is already a step in the right direction as the added security is already an additional layer of protection.
“We have also ensured that new password policies will implemented – this is to make it more difficult for threat agents to crack passwords.
“We are also in the process of ensuring that regular systems updates will be done to ensure security patches are being deployed to all workstations.
“Something else we are looking at is upgrading our current anti-virus and anti-malware software to compensate for these new waves of cybercrime that are rampant all over the world.” – Staff Reporter