Hackers Take Down IT Systems in Lowell, Massachusetts

The city of Lowell in the US state of Massachusetts has been hit by a cyber attack impacting the municipality's IT systems.

"We realized Monday morning around 3 to 5 am that there was a breach," said City Manager Tom Golden.

The city’s Management Information Systems Department (MIS) determined the best course of action was to isolate affected systems for troubleshooting, leaving some servers, networks, phones, and other systems inaccessible.

The incident bears the signs of a typical ransomware attack, but city officials say there is no reason to believe any data has been compromised.

"The other professionals in law enforcement have looked at this, and we're all comfortable, but it's going to take us a little bit of time," Golden said in a press conference.

MIS is now developing a plan to address the issue and, out of an abundance of caution, will keep all systems offline while working to secure them.

Officials said 911, Fire and Emergency phones were not impacted.

It’s encouraging to see Lowell officials optimistic about the integrity of the data on city servers, but these incidents too often end up with hackers revealing they’ve stolen precious data and putting it up for sale on hacking forums - or extorting the victim in exchange for not leaking the data.

Time will tell if this was indeed a successful ransomware attack or merely a disruptive cyber incident.