Oakland Declares State of Emergency Due to Ransomware Attack

The City of Oakland has declared a local state of emergency as a network outage caused by last week’s ransomware attack on city systems has left several non-emergency systems impacted or offline.

“911 dispatch, fire emergency services, and the City’s financial systems are not impacted,” city officials said in a Feb. 13 update. “However, because the City took the network offline to contain the attack, many systems remain down as City Departments develop plans to continue providing services safely to the public.”

The following day, Interim City Administrator G. Harold Duffey declared a local state of emergency due to the effects of the outages.

“The declaration of a local emergency allows the City to Oakland to expedite the procurement of equipment and materials, activate emergency workers if needed, and issue orders on an expedited basis, while we work to safely restore systems and bring our services back online,” the city said.

The city’s IT department is working with cybersecurity experts to recover from the attack.

The latest update, issued Feb. 15, reveals that the city continues to work day in and day out to restore impacted systems as quickly and securely as possible.

Oakland citizens are still struggling to collect payments, process reports, and issue permits and licenses.

“As a result, some of our buildings are closed,” the city said. “We encourage the public to email the service counters they want to visit before coming to City buildings.”

As of today, it’s still unclear who is behind the attack and what the hackers demand in exchange for decryption keys or to refrain from leaking city data.