After the cyber attack on Schwerin's municipal IT service provider, Stralsund and Greifswald also report problems.
In the state capital and the Ludwigslust-Parchim district, companies and authorities are trying to get the citizen service up and running.
Schwerin - After the cyber attack on the IT service provider of the state capital and the Ludwigslust-Parchim district, other cities in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are also struggling with IT problems. In addition to the city of Greifswald, the city of Stralsund also reported being affected by failures, although both cities are not customers of the Mecklenburg municipal service (KSM) and the Schwerin IT and service company (SIS), whose servers were targeted by malware on Friday morning.
While the city of Greifswald initially reported severe IT restrictions, only the online services of the vehicle registration office and the driver's license office were not operational by the evening. In Stralsund, for example, the housing benefit office, the registry office or the processing of identity cards were affected, a spokesman for the city said. The Internet service portal "OpenR @ thaus" was also completely switched off on Monday afternoon.
How the problems came about in the municipalities not directly affected by the cyber attack is still unclear: The city of Greifswald blamed a shutdown of large parts of the state-wide administrative network "CN LAVINE" for the problems.
However, the operator, the state IT service provider DVZ, said that on Friday, according to previous information, only ten municipalities were separated from the state network as a precaution, Greifswald and Stralsund were not among them.
Those involved tried to clarify, it said.
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In the administration of the state capital, after the complete shutdown of the IT on Monday, the telephone system worked again, but the citizen service remained closed to the public. Mayor Rico Badenschier (SPD) announced in the afternoon that appointments that have already been agreed can be kept from Tuesday. “The issue of payment transactions gives us a lot of stomach ache, and we mostly process it digitally,” he said. Together with KSM and Sparkasse, they are in talks on how to make payouts possible. The end of the week is the next date for the issue of social assistance, until then a solution must be found.
Otherwise one is still in the process of determining which parts of the server were encrypted by the attack and are therefore no longer accessible. The investigations of the authorities are ongoing, according to the information, for tactical reasons Badenschier did not want to say anything about possible blackmail letters. The IT forensic scientists support the city according to the information in the search for the cause. As Badenschier further explained, the administration computers are still not in operation. However, the educational school network is not affected. "The lessons work," said the mayor.
For the remaining services of the citizen service, they are working flat out to establish analog processes that were originally replaced by digitization. There are already successes at the registry office: birth announcements, marriages and death announcements can already be certified again. Regarding the registration system, however, they are trying to get help from other municipalities, Badenschier assumes that urgent passport matters can be processed again from Thursday, but he cannot firmly promise.
The attacked IT companies KSM and SIS are responsible on the one hand for the administration and on the other hand for the municipal companies. At 3:00 a.m., encryption software had started to encrypt parts of the administrative data of Schwerin, the Ludwigslust-Parchim district and other administrative offices and cities belonging to the district. As the city of Schwerin announced on Monday, there was still no evidence that data was being transported away from the servers.
Friday's attack is the second in the northeast this month. At the beginning of October, the Wismar public utility company was the victim of a similar attack. From the point of view of the IT experts of the Chaos Compter Club (CCC) it is not surprising that the attacks are increasing: “No, we are not surprised,” said the CCC spokesman Linus Neumann. In addition to protection against so-called ransomware attacks by e-mail filters and similar measures, it is above all important to improve detection and recovery, i.e. to ensure that you survive an attack with the least possible damage. From Neumann's point of view, administrations and companies have apparently not yet learned this in the past few years, despite the great damage.
According to the experts, IT training courses for employees, on the other hand, have a short half-life; the idea of such training is that employees are to blame.
However, you cannot be blamed for unsafe work processes.
From the point of view of the MV City and Community Day, the municipalities and the state must re-examine the topic of IT security after the current cyber attacks.
It shouldn't fail because of money, but above all the exchange is important.
In the specific case, from the point of view of the municipal association, one must learn together from the mistakes of the past and close any weaknesses.
dpa