Cyberattack prompts Long Beach, California to shut down IT systems

On Tuesday, the Californian City of Long Beach experienced a cyberattack that prompted an immediate shutdown of parts of its IT network to halt the attack's further spread.

With a population of around 460,000, Long Beach is the seventh-largest city in California. Following the cyberattack on November 14th, the city enlisted a cybersecurity firm for investigation, also informing the FBI of the incident.

In response to the attack, Long Beach officials rapidly took several systems offline, a standard practice to prevent the attack from extending to additional devices. A statement on the city's website mentioned, "Out of an abundance of caution, systems will be taken offline effective immediately during the investigation and potential remediation. Systems are anticipated to be offline for upwards of several days."

While the city's email and phone systems are expected to remain operational, and public facilities like City Hall will be open, some digital services will experience delays. The city requested public understanding and patience as it navigates this incident.

Currently, emergency services are not impacted by this outage. However, details regarding the nature of the cyberattack and whether any data was compromised remain unclear. The characteristics of this incident suggest the possibility of a ransomware attack, which often involves data theft.

As of now, no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack. Typically, such claims emerge a week or more following the incident, often coinciding with extortion attempts.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst with Emsisoft who monitors ransomware attacks on U.S. local governments, informed BleepingComputer that should this incident be confirmed as ransomware, it would mark the 80th local government affected by such attacks in 2023. Among these, data theft has been confirmed in 46 cases.