“Municipality of Hof van Twente Held Responsible for Millions in Damage After Hack: RTV East Report”

The municipality of Hof van Twente is responsible for the millions of euros in damage it suffered after a hack. The judge ruled today. It also has to pay 20,000 euros in legal costs, reports RTV East.

The municipality was hacked in 2020 and tried to recover the 4.2 million euros in damage from Switch IT Solutions, the company hired for the security of the online municipality systems. According to the municipality’s lawyer, the company had delivered “a breach of contract”.

But according to the court, the hired company did what was in the contract. It was precisely the municipality that did not have things in order.

For example, independent research showed that it was not really made difficult for the hackers: a municipal employee had changed the password of the administrator account of the servers to ‘Welcome2020’. The protection of the systems, the firewall, was also adjusted by the municipality, so that hackers had free rein in the computer systems.

“The municipality has opened a back door in the system that it manages and set an easy-to-guess password for the door, so that the guards did not intervene,” the court ruled today.

The hack destroyed a total of ninety virtual servers and destroyed the backups. An international data restorer finally succeeded in recovering the deleted files from the Civil Affairs, Social Domain and Financial Administration departments.