The federal agency in the state of Indiana that gives low-income housing for the people faces a ransomware attack that compromised its ability to disseminate rent payments to landlords.
Based on reports, the housing agency employees lost access to the email accounts during the campaign that started weeks ago. Marcia Lewis, an executive director for the affected agency, was also affected by the attack after she lost her email. Fortunately, she already regained access to it last week.
The company has initiated a joint investigation with law enforcement agencies and IT service providers. However, the housing firm has yet to release any information about the attacker’s identity or motive.
The rent for the low-income housing was delayed due to the ransomware attack.
The ransomware attack has compromised the dissemination of this month’s rent for the low-income housing project to landlords. Hence, approximately 8,000 Indianapolis families were affected since the federal housing choice voucher program was also delayed.
The voucher program provides rental assistance to low-income generating households, disabled individuals, and the elderly.
Fortunately, the director said their agency had accomplished all October rent payments to the landlords. Still, last week, their employees had to manually distribute their client’s utility allowance checks and critical vendor payments because of an IT outage.
In addition, Lewis stated that their agency is scheduled to complete all rent payments this month. She also assured everyone that the ransomware would not negatively impact their clients until their team fixed the issue.
The housing agency is working to accomplish late fees because of the delayed rent payments. Moreover, the company director did not estimate the total amount of those deferred fees.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s guidelines about late fees assured tenants that their landlords would not evict them for nonpayment by the agency, especially with the current status of the ransomware attack.
There are at least 25,000 individuals that are dependent on the low-income housing agency for several housing benefits.
