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After coder’s attack some areas of Johannesburg were left without electricity

Yesterday, on July 25, 2019, an unnamed cryptographer hit City Power, one of the largest electricity suppliers for the South African metropolis of Johannesburg. As a result, residents of the largest in South Africa city massively complain of a power outage.

According to the company’s official statement, ransomware attack affected database, the internal network, web applications and the official City Power website. Due to the lack of access to internal applications, company employees found it difficult to respond to crash reports at the same speed as usual.

“The virus has affected our customers’ ability to vend, that is buying electricity, upload invoices, or access our website.It may also affect our response to some outages as the system to order and dispatch material is affected”, — reports City Power.

The technical details of the incidents and the name of malware that has caused chaos in the company’s infrastructure, have not yet been disclosed.

Read also: Hackers attacked network of the FSB contractor: they became aware of de-anonymization of Tor projects and not only

In addition, the South African branch of Business Insider writes that on the 25th of every month, many South Africans receive a salary, and it is on this day that they pay for new packages of electricity for the upcoming month. Because of the attack on City Power, people were faced with the inability to purchase electricity. Additionally, on social networks you can find many complaints of power outages in Johannesburg.

It should be noted that the residents of Johannesburg are still lucky to some extent. The fact is that the attack affected only the City Power network, but did not touch the urban infrastructure of the megalopolis, and earlier, cryptographers were “taken in hostage” entire cities.

So, only in recent months, authorities of the American cities of Riviera Beach ($ 600,000) and Lake City ($ 500,000), as well as Jackson County ($ 400,000), were forced to pay ransom to ransomware operators.

What is worse, this week Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced that he was in a state of emergency until August 21. The reason for this was a series of ransomware attacks aimed at school districts in Northern Louisiana. Because of these incidents, the IT networks of the three school districts were turned off, and the files were encrypted and inaccessible.

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Daniel Zimmermann

Daniel Zimmermann has been writing on security and malware subjects for many years and has been working in the security industry for over 10 years. Daniel was educated at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany and currently lives in New York.

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