The city of Hamilton says a “cybersecurity incident” that knocked out communications, including crucial phone and email service, is still going on almost a day after first revealing the disruption Sunday morning.
City officials said the widespread outage continued Monday morning and the Hamilton Street Railway was also having issues with its electronic services.
Bus drivers were driving Monday morning without computerized schedules and the next-stop announcement system.
The city says busses are still running as are DARTs buses despite the issues.
Hamilton Public Library’s system has also been inaccessible over the last day.
In a release, staff said experts were “actively responding” to determine cause and impact.
Problems were first disclosed just before 11 a.m. on Sunday via social media.
“Our priority is to safeguard the integrity of our systems and protect any sensitive or private information,” the statement said.
Cybersecurity expert David Shipley told Global News Hamilton is among dozens of Canadian cities that have been hacked in the last decade.
“Unfortunately for Hamilton, however, it now takes over the crown of the largest Canadian municipality to deal with a cybersecurity incident that we know of publicly,” Shipley said.
Terry Cutler, CEO of Psychology Labs and an international award-winning expert on the subject, insists there’s a “good chance” private and sensitive data was breached in the incident.
He says typically cybercriminals spend somewhere around 286 days in an average network before being detected.
“And during that time, they have so much time to figure out how your network works, where your data is, copy it out,” said Cutler.
The city’s call centre, which is still operational, says it’s working on the problem but has no timeline for when systems will return to normal.
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