German has declared the country’s first cyber catastrophe yesterday by stating that a cyber attack hit almost all the computer systems in the municipality of Anhalt Bitterfeld in the state of Saxony-Anhalt and disrupted completely. Authorities are unsure when the offices will reopen to the public and expect to resolve the issue within next 15 days.
As the municipality was using obsolete hardware and software in the office, hackers easily gained access into the network and disrupted the digital operations so much that the Federal Office for Information Security aka BSI Cybersecurity watchdog was on the verge to declare an emergency in the entire region that has a population of 156,890 people.
A detailed investigation has been launched on the cyber attack by the law enforcement and a third party and sources say that the attack could be of ransomware variant as the entire network access was blocked with encryption algorithms that are hard to crack.
In the current year 2021, a lot of government organizations were hit by malware attacks such as ransomware. And Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and the latest attack on Microsoft servers stands as the best example to prove the point.
Note- A ransomware attack is a malware attack where hackers encrypt the database until a ransom is paid. But some notorious file encrypting malware spreading gangs are nowadays seen stealing the data first and the encrypting the entire database till a ransom is paid. In such cases, the cyber crooks make money by selling the siphoned data on the dark web, if in case, the victim fails or denies paying a ransom.
