Allentown Struggles with $1 Million Cyber-Attack

The city of Allentown, Pennsylvania, is struggling to remediate a malware attack that could cost nearly $1 million to mitigate. According to local paper The Morning Call, the city’s critical systems have been hit by the malware known as Emotet, impacting both financial and public safety operations, according to Mayor Ed Pawlowski. Allentown’s finance department can’t complete any external banking transactions, the city’s 185 surveillance cameras are impacted and the police department can’t access Pennsylvania State Police databases, Pawlowski said. Emotet spread like wildfire around the city’s networks, self-replicating (Emotet can spread itself to other systems by stealing an address book from a computer on the network) and harvesting city employees’ credentials along the way. There’s an intimation that phishing was the initial infection vector: Pawlowski warned city residents not to open emails and attachments from city employees. In the past Emotet has been spread via weaponized Microsoft Word documents.