Mayor De Wever: “To date, no indication that personal data have been stolen by cybercriminals” (Antwerp)
Both Bart De Wever and alderman of Digitization Erica Caluwaerts (Open Vld) believe that the timing of the cyber attack on the computer system of the city of Antwerp is very ironic and failed. Quite recently, the city of Antwerp had rolled out a major cybersecurity program, precisely because the city was very aware of the dangers of its cybercrime. “This is the fraud of the 21st century,” says De Wever. “Why would you still run risks through a home burglary, if you can just break into a computer from Russia?”
Despite the increased allocation of budgets and resources to cyber security, there is no 100% guarantee that the security walls cannot be broken, according to De Wever and chief resilience officer Bart Bruelemans.
Passwords and building plans
But De Wever was soon able to announce reasonably positive news. “From what our experts can make to date, there are currently no indications that any personal information has been stolen by the criminals where private burgers can get serious. We will continue to closely monitor this.”
So what has been captured or at least blocked? That is less clear. There may be employees’ passwords on the paving stones. Also the risk that building plans and documents related to finance and insurance were inspected. But the full picture has yet to unfold in the past.
“Don’t make the enemy smarter by communicating”
In recent weeks, there have been grumbling here and there about why the city is not communicating more transparently about the impact and the consequences for the burgers. “Every expert tells us that it is best to communicate as little as possible about a cyber attack,” says Bart Bruelemans, who is responsible for communication to the public. “Any communication about that makes your enemy stronger. As a result, we could only communicate with the citizen about what still worked well. Nevertheless, we quickly set up an information page, while we were told to go into full virtual lockdown.”
Nevertheless, the city had no choice but to go into a kind of digital lockdown in recent weeks, as a result of which many services were unavailable to citizens. “The restart could be faster, but the intention is to work safely,” said De Wever. “We only put systems back online when security is 100 percent guaranteed. The easy days will restart a lot of services, but activating the very last applications will still take weeks, based on a guaranteed list.”
“Everything back to normal by summer 2023”
But the fact that certain services were already available or guaranteed after a few days is, according to the speaker, nothing short of a feat. “For example, the systems for payment of living wages were down, but we still came up with quick solutions to be able to provide those kinds of services.”
How long can it take before all services are provided again and everything works as before? “The target date to keep the burgers to a minimum is the end of January,” says Bruelemans. Only by the summer of 2023 everything will be able to work internally again, as was the case before the cyber attack. “It is hell we have to go through, but we are doing everything we can to minimize the impact of citizens.”
“Why are our data away from Darkweb? A mystery”
Striking: in recent weeks, Play’s page on the Dark Web stated that sensitive hacked data would be released today, Monday. But that info met While the afterclock, suddenly disappeared. Yet it appears that De Wever and Youri Segers, CEO of Digipolis, that the city has not paid any ransom. “Then why are we no longer on the Dark Web? We are guessing.”
According to the city, the fact that no payment was made is partly due to the nature of the captured data and the lack of guarantee of a solution upon payment. “It is not an obvious decision and I understand colleagues in a subsequent situation who make a different decision,” says De Wever. “But you have no guarantee that captured data was not distributed in some other way, that the systems will universally be operational again after payment, or that the criminals will not strike again.”