The city council of Seville, Spain, has fallen victim to a cyberattack attributed to the LockBit cybercrime gang. The attack, which began on Monday, has disrupted various city services, including those provided by the police, firefighters, and tax collection departments.
Furthermore, city officials have declared that they will not pay the $1.5 million ransom demanded by the hackers. Although the incident was initially thought to be an internal system failure, further investigation revealed it to be a cyberattack by LockBit, a group known for encrypting networks and threatening to release stolen data. As Seville works on restoring its services, Mayor José Luis Sanz expressed the city’s determination to recover as swiftly as possible.
Additionally, Seville, as the capital of Spain’s autonomous Andalusia region and the country’s fourth-largest city, plays a vital role in the region. It is unclear whether LockBit has managed to steal any data from the city’s systems, and there have been no reports of the group leaking any data so far. To address the cyberattack, Spain’s national police and the incident response unit of the National Cryptological Center (CCN-CERT) have launched an investigation.
LockBit has been involved in various high-profile attacks throughout the year, including targeting an electric utility in Montreal and Siemens Healthineers, a healthcare technology giant. The group’s influence within the ransomware ecosystem has raised concerns among cybersecurity analysts, even as questions about the reliability of its infrastructure persist.
