A significant cyberattack has recently hit the city hall server of São José do Rio Preto, located in the country of Brazil. This serious incident, which occurred on Thursday morning, compromised all systems of the Municipal Administration, especially affecting the vital Health area. The Municipal Data Processing Company, known as Empro, is responsible for the city hall’s information technology and immediately responded. They stated the systems were immediately isolated right after the positive identification of the malicious cyberattack against their core infrastructure. Empro has since started the full restore process which is based on its existing backups and claims databases were not compromised.
With the city’s main computer system currently down, all patient care at Emergency Care Units and Basic Health Units is being done manually. This necessary switch to manual processes has unfortunately caused significant slowness and the formation of very long patient queues at facilities. The SAMU emergency telephone service is also temporarily unavailable, making it much more difficult to provide essential help in urgent cases. At the city’s municipal laboratory, only the most urgent exams are being carried out by the medical staff at this current time. All other non-urgent consultations and various different elective exams have now been suspended and will be rescheduled by the city at a later date.
Other important city sectors were also significantly affected by this widespread and very disruptive cyberattack against the municipal government in Brazil.
The Secretariat of Works reported that its Aprova Digital system, which is used for work protocols, was currently down due to the outage. However, Aprova Digital itself later informed reporters that its own system had actually remained 100% available without any service instabilities. They said access issues occurred because the city network was disconnected from the internet, preventing some users from connecting normally. Additionally, the Municipal Civil Guard had its main emergency number 153 temporarily deactivated because of the extensive system outage affecting them.
The city’s official data processing company, Empro, highlighted that it typically faces more than twelve different cyberattack attempts every single day.
The company further stated that these various attempts are usually successfully blocked by their existing robust and layered security systems and defenses. However, this particular cyberattack on Thursday managed to successfully overcome all of the city’s current digital barriers and various protections. It ultimately compromised the overall operation of the entire City Hall of São José do Rio Preto, Brazil, affecting many city services. Authorities who specialize in investigating cybercrime are already following the case to determine who was responsible for this major city-wide service disruption.
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