Palermo, the capital of the Italian island of Sicily, has suffered a cyberattack that disrupted a broad range of operations and services to both citizens and visiting tourists.
The city is home to 1.3 million people, making it the fifth most populated city in Italy. It’s also a tourist hotspot, which welcomes nearly 2.3 million tourists every year.
According to local media reports, the attack impacted a number of services, including the municipal police operations center, the public video surveillance management system, and all of the municipality’s services.
Due to the incident citizens were unable to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems and were forced to resort to old-fashioned fax machines to contact government agencies. The attack also impacted tourists and visitors as they couldn’t access online booking services for tickets to museums and theaters, or reservations for the use of sporting facilities.
Paolo Petralia Camassa, the councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo, said that the municipality’s IT system was temporarily shut down and isolated from the network as a precaution.
It’s not clear yet the nature of the attack the City of Palermo experienced. While some signs point to a ransomware incident, officials said that they “have not received any demands, and according to the verifications carried out so far, there is no encrypted or stolen data for which a ransom could be demanded.”
Last month, the pro-Russia hacker group known as “Killnet” carried out attacks on websites of multiple Italian institutions including those belonging to Italy's defense ministry, Senate, National Health Institute, and the Automobile Club d’Italia. In a message in their Telegram channel the group explained that that the attack on the country was part of “military cyber exercises.”