The ransomware attack that hit Oakland on Wednesday February 8, 2023 is still crippling many of the city’s services a week later. In fact, the situation is so bad that the Interim City Administrator has now declared a state of emergency.
Tweet by City of Oakland
Tweet announcing the state of emergency
The ransomware attack initially forced the City’s Information Technology Department (ITD) to take all systems offline while it coordinated with law enforcement to investigate the attack.
The impact of the outage is far-reaching and ongoing. The network outage has impacted many non-emergency systems including the ability to collect payments and process reports, permits, and licenses. As a result, some of the city buildings are closed and the public is under advice to email ahead of any planned visit to one of the impacted departments.
G. Harold Duffey declared the state of emergency due to the ongoing impact of the network outages as a result of the ransomware attack. According to a spokesperson for the City:
“The declaration of a local emergency allows the City to Oakland to expedite the procurement of equipment and materials, activate emergency workers if needed, and issue orders on an expedited basis, while we work to safely restore systems and bring our services back online.”
Fortunately, the attack has not affected crucial infrastructure like the 911 dispatch and fire and emergency resources, but the Oakland Police Department (OPD) did say that response time has been delayed and asked the public.So far the City has not provided an indication of when the situation will be back to normal.At this point it’s not clear which ransomware group is behind the attack on the City of Oakland. None of them has claimed the attack and the leak sites of the major groups we checked don’t mention Oakland. This could be because the ransom negotiations have not been broken off yet. With the investigation apparently ongoing there is no indication of which infection method was used.
