2023-08-21 10:26:09
There are hospitals, small businesses, schools… and local communities are not spared. The town hall of Sartrouville (Yvelines) was paralyzed, this Thursday, August 17, by a cyberattack, carried out by hackers who demand a ransom.
Around midnight and a half in the night from Wednesday to Thursday, the intranet computer system of the town hall simply stops. The IT department finds that all data has been encrypted and that a ransomware-type virus named “Medusa” has infected the municipality’s work and backup servers. “All the services of the town hall are affected and inoperative with the exception of the municipal police and the service of identity cards and passports”, specifies a source close to the file.
“The town hall has 41 or 42 internal servers which are located in the premises of the technical service and the agents work daily on 450 computers”, specifies a source close to the technical services. This attack poses a real difficulty because the town hall’s machines store sensitive data.
200,000 euros in damage in 24 hours
“There is financial information concerning all public contracts, payments to companies with bank details, the community budget with all accounting and bank details, not to mention the payroll system,” adds our source.
His computers also contain all the information concerning the agents. And in addition, there are medical records from the municipal health center, data from the social action center, nurseries, kindergartens and elementary schools. There are also files concerning the municipal school of arts and the associations of the commune.
The provisional damage of this story is estimated at 200,000 euros. The town hall has filed a complaint and does not intend to give in to blackmail. Investigators from the cybercrime brigade of the Paris judicial police BL2C are in charge of the investigations.
“Learn the lessons and better protect ourselves”
Mayor (LR) Pierre Fond hopes that the perpetrators will be identified and brought to justice. He wants to be reassuring and announces the return to service of the activity from this Friday, August 18. “Fortunately, all our data is backed up on external servers and in the end, we only lost a day’s work. But we are going to organize a meeting to learn the lessons and better protect ourselves, ”notes the elected official. The town hall had already suffered several attempted cyberattacks which had so far been thwarted.
“Local authorities are the second category of victim most affected by ransomware attacks behind VSEs, SMEs and ETIs”, explains the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), which has identified 109 ransomware in 2022 in France.
In the Yvelines, the neighboring town of Houilles was the target in early 2021. Almost all of the servers had been contaminated. Since then, its municipal services have learned lessons.
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