Back to paper and pen, for lack of internet. For three weeks, the town halls of several cities of Seine-Saint-Denis have been using the means at hand to provide public service after a major computer attack, a growing threat to local communities.
On the night of December 5 to 6, a ransomware attack – which encrypts data and demands the payment of a large ransom to restore access – hit the servers of the Syndicat intercommunal d’Informatique (SII) of Bobigny, including depend on several municipalities and public bodies of the department.
Administration most exposed to contaminated infrastructure, the town hall of Bobigny had to disconnect its internet access in an attempt to limit the spread. Unable to turn on the computers, deprived of connection, its municipal employees found themselves cut off from the world. Gold “we have a duty of continuity of public service”, explains Rached Zehou, delegated municipal councilor in Bobigny and president of the SII, welcoming “ingenuity” municipal officials in this crisis.
Municipal email addresses are no longer accessible? Temporary Gmail boxes are created to be able to communicate with the public. Are the landlines almost all unusable? 4G boxes are installed in certain priority services to allow them to go on the Internet from laptops. To obtain a birth or death certificate, residents must now go in person to the civil registry and can no longer complete the process online. Invoices for extracurricular activities can not be sent, nor the sums collected. You can still enter into a PACS, but not dissolve a PACS.
In La Courneuve, another city heavily impacted but less heavily than Bobigny, “We are finding solutions almost everywhere in the form of Excel tables, paper archiving or the use of other software”, says its Director General of Services Anthony Giunta. With Microsoft licenses, this popular municipality of 45,000 inhabitants was able to open new mailboxes on another server for the agents who needed them the most. But they no longer have their message history or contact book. Overnight, “We no longer had any email. In parentheses, it’s not that bad at first, but it poses a real concern in terms of the flow of information”, notes Anthony Giunta.
No return to normal is in sight at the moment. Out of the question, of course, to pay the ransom of four million euros demanded by the pirates. Before they can fully restart the servers, authorities must ensure that the threat has been contained and that the systems are not at risk of a new attack soon after.
In Blanc-Mesnil, the damage is more limited. The emails still work, but some professional software necessary for human resources management or town planning is inaccessible. As a result, the 1,300 or so municipal officials could not receive their December pay as usual before Christmas, it will only be paid to them a few days after.
Deprived of their automated software, human resources managers have returned to a certain craft. “It requires working the old-fashioned way. They go over the sheets one by one, redo the calculations from what was paid last month. It’s more complicated to go through”, tells AFP the cabinet of mayor Jean-Philippe Ranquet (Libres!).
In a recent report, the National Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI) noted an acceleration in ransomware attacks against local communities. In the space of a year alone, for Seine-Saint-Denis alone, the towns of Bondy, Pantin and Villepinte have previously reported large-scale computer attacks affecting their operations.
“Local authorities have increasingly important issues, we manage large amounts of data, both on city employees and on our inhabitants”, analyzes Rached Zehou, also an IT engineer specializing in infrastructure deployment. “The state is transferring more and more skills to us,” he says, “which requires more digitization, without the means to protect themselves on the other side.”
(With AFP)
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