The Vice Society ransomware group has allegedly attacked Italy’s Palermo city, which caused a massive service outage across the entire district.
The cyberespionage attack happened last week, and all internet-dependent services were unavailable, affecting approximately 1.3 million individuals, including tourists that visited the city.
The law enforcement and concerned authorities assessed the situation’s criticality after confirming an attack. They noted that all systems were immediately taken down to mitigate the attack’s impact and warned that the outage might last for an extensive period.
Additionally, the temporary shutdown of its network made the attack appear suspicious, like ransomware, and it did not take part in a DDoS attack that recently compromised Italy.
Vice Society took responsibility for the ransomware attack against Palermo.
Last week, Vice Society mentioned that they were the threat actors who operated the campaign against Palermo by posting an entry on its dark web data leak website. They have threatened the city to publish all stolen data on their leak site if a ransom is not provided.
This detail indicates that the arrangements for the ransom payment have not concluded yet, and Vice Society thinks its threats to the city’s officials will be effective. The city government should also make a quick decision regarding the attack as the threat group might have personally identifiable information about Palermo’s residents and the critical data of anyone who visited the city.
It is also worth stating that the Vice Society group has not yet posted any stolen samples, implying that the data exfiltration cannot be confirmed or verified by anyone.
The ransomware group is notorious for breaching networks through the abuse of known vulnerabilities on outdated systems. Although it is impossible to identify if the city’s computer had a security vulnerability that the hackers could exploit, it is still not far from the possibility that the Vice Society actors may have used such a flaw.
Unfortunately, despite the severity of the current issue, Palermo’s officials have not yet revealed any details of the ransomware attack.
