Cyber security Team Identified Ransomware Utilized to Compromise City Power

Residents of Johannesburg using pre-paid electricity meters were not able to load the electricity purchased from City Power and were also unable to purchase further electricity due to a ransomware attack which compromised City Power's database.

Earlier, City Power said while the variant of ransomware utilized to carry out the attack remains unknown, they have the encrypted network, applications, and database being restored and rebuilt by their ICT department.

Easing off the customers, Isaac Mangena, the utility's spokesperson, said, "We want to assure residents of Johannesburg that City Power systems were able to proactively intercept this and managed to deal with it quicker."

"Customers should also not panic, as none of their details were compromised," Mangena assured.

On Friday, City Power announced that their cybersecurity team identified the variant of malware which temporarily paralyzed the city's computer systems.

Reportedly, the email systems took the hardest hit by the ransomware and were taking a while to recover and be functional again.

While giving updates, Mangena said “The virus samples have been taken to the external labs for analysis and testing,”

“Our IT technicians have also recovered and, in [a] few instances, reconstructed most of the systems,, applications, and data that was threatened, using backup files.”

Victims of the cyber power attack along with the customers, have been raging since the incident happened and encrypted the computer databases, applications and network.

City Power turned to external cyber security experts who worked in association with their team to tackle the issue.

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