Washington State has revealed in a public statement issued yesterday that it is shutting down its Professional Online Licensing and Regulatory Information System(POLARIS) as it has detected a cyber attack that could have compromised driving license user details to hackers.
As per the details available to our Cybersecurity Insiders, the accessed information might include social security numbers, DOB, driving license numbers, physical address proofs and other such personal identifying information (PII).
The Washington Office of Cybersecurity has issued a public statement and said that its IT staff detected the incident on January 24th, 2022 and took all necessary measures to contain the consequences arising from the incident.
Issuance of driving licenses will carry on as per the scheduled online bookings, as such information is stored on other servers.
To those who cannot access the POLARIS online service, they can access and fill in the digital intent for renewal form from February 8th, 2022.
Interestingly, the Washington based government agency has assured that it will not suspend the people whose licenses get expired during the period of period of POLARIS outage.
As the department issues around 40 types of licenses such as a license for skin doctor, a license for real estate broker, architects, driving instructors, businesses doing trade and such….
More details are awaited, as the extent of the digital attack is being estimated by experts. Unconfirmed sources state that the attack was of ransomware kind and the hackers could belong to the notorious Conti Ransomware gang.
