The Arrecife City Council has suffered two hacks in its computer system in less than a year, and the last one occurred last April, in the midst of the state of alarm. This has been confirmed by the Councilor for New Technologies, Personnel, Security and Emergencies, Eduardo Placeres, who explained that they are now "putting all their efforts into reinforcing security."
"It can't happen to us twice in eight months, especially because of the image we give," the councilor admitted, pointing out that the first one occurred as soon as the current government group entered, last August.
Since then, he says they had tried to take measures and that precisely when the state of alarm was decreed, they decided to migrate all the City Council's emails to an external server, to prevent this from happening again. "In the previous servers we had a lot of junk mail, a lot of spam, which could have compromised security", he detailed.
However, after performing the dump and adapting the emails for teleworking, he believes that "with the rush" there may have been "an open way to attack" the system.
"It also happened to the Tías City Council"
"It didn't just happen to us. It also happened to the Tías City Council, but they solved it quickly", he stressed, pointing out that it also happened in other city councils in Spain. In the case of Arrecife, he added that the problem was that they took time to detect the hack, so in that time "it had already sneaked through all the computers, through the entire system."
According to the councilor, they realized the attack when several workers who were finishing their day noticed that the clocking system was not working, so they could not clock out. There, the IT service was notified, which since then "has not stopped", according to the councilor.
"They have been day and night and have been working hard to restore everything again," he said, specifying that no information has been lost, because they have recovered the security copies, and that the information of the taxpayers has not been compromised either, because that data is "encrypted."
Increase security and trace the origin of the hack
Regarding who could be behind this hack or if it is an international attack, the councilor states that they do not know so far. In fact, according to him, that is why they have not gone to the National Police to report what happened. "We have hired a security company, to see by different means where we can increase security and also to see where it has entered", he said in this regard, adding that they are trying to "get to the end of the matter" and that they will file the complaint if they find any clue about the origin.
Regarding the measures to reestablish all the computers, the councilor has referred to the problem they found with the computer equipment. "They are tractors, it's a barbarity. We are trying to run as fast as we can, but it is impossible. There has been no investment in computer equipment for more than four years. Equipment that has to be updated every year", he questioned, recalling that the City Council has now announced an investment of more than 40,000 euros to acquire new computers.
In addition, he explained that they were working on advances in the digital service offered to citizens through the website, but after the cyberattacks they have had to postpone it to "focus" on increasing the security of the system.
