Alex Trelinski
A CYBERATTACK has paralysed Elche City Council’s computer network and telephones since Monday.
The hackers have allegedly demanded a ‘massive’ ransom for them to restore the network.
This has not been confirmed by Elche’s mayor, Pablo Ruz who described what happened as the ‘biggest cyberattack in the city’s history’.
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The Policia Nacional are investigating in association with Europol.
August’s salary payroll to around 2,400 council staff will be authorised on Wednesday by Ruz signing a decree by hand.
The paralysis affects the whole of the authority’s digital infrastructure including including the municipal electronic headquarters- meaning residents cannot conduct any business with Elche council.
Sources told the Informacion newspaper that the problem was ‘very serious’ and have no idea when things will return to normal.
A hack in July at Villajoyosa council took weeks to sort out and even then, some files were lost for good.
A specialist firm has been brought in by Elche to work on clearing out the malicious code.
The problem was detected last Sunday by an official who logged into the system to work from home
The August payroll was being prepared at the time and he believed it was an issue with his computer and so thought nothing more of it.
More alerts went off on Monday leading to encrypted screens and shared folders disappearing- many of those folders crucial for council employees and the work they do.
Staff were told not to turn on their computers, meaning that whole departments were in effect closed down.
Each computer terminal will start being ‘cleansed’ individually from Wednesday- .isolating them from the network to prevent the ransomware virus from spreading further.
The good news is that since a lot of staff are on holiday, many computers were shut down at the time of the cyberattack, raising the possibility that data could be saved.
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