Johannesburg electricity provider City Power gets hit by ransomware attack

• The ransomware infection encrypted the company's databases, systems, applications, the internal network, and the official website.
• The attack disabled a few clients from buying electricity units using the company’s prepaid electricity vending system.

What is the issue?

City Power, an electricity provider owned by the city of Johannesburg, suffered a ransomware attack.

“#JoburgUpdates JUST IN: City Power has been hit by a virus which has led to a blackout to its IT systems. We apologise to our City of Joburg customers. The virus has attacked the City Power database and other softwares, impacting most of our applications and networks ^GZ,” City of Johannesburg tweeted.

What is the impact?

• The ransomware infection encrypted the company's databases, systems, applications, the internal network, and the official website.
• The attack disabled a few clients from buying electricity units using the company’s prepaid electricity vending system.
• The incident also affected the company’s response time to logged calls as some of its internal systems to dispatch and order material have been delayed.

“The virus has affected our customers' ability to vend, that is buying electricity, upload invoices, or access our website. It may also affect our response to some outages as the system to order and dispatch material is affected. @CityofJoburgZA,” City Power tweeted.

What was the response?

• The applications and networks that were impacted by the ransomware attack have been cleaned up and restored by the city municipality.
• However, Johannesburg municipality is working diligently to restore the remaining applications and databases that were encrypted by the ransomware.
• Meanwhile, City Power's cybersecurity team is investigating the incident in order to determine the source of the attack.

City Power also created a few alternative measures for its customers, which include:

• Fault logging - customers may not be able to use the website, as such they are requested to log calls on their cellphones using citypower.mobi
• Submitting Invoices - Suppliers seeking to submit invoices for payments should rather bring their invoices physically to City Power offices in Booysen.

“#JoburgUpdates @CityPowerJhb: Customers should not panic as none of their details were compromised. We apologise for the inconvenience caused to the people of the City of Joburg. Please be patient with us, we expect to have everything back in order by the end of Thursday ^GZ,” the City tweeted.