Some residents of Johannesberg, South Africa, have been left without power after the city’s electricity supplier was struck by ransomware.

City Power, the local power company was struck by an unnamed form of ransomware on Thursday morning local time, encrypting all of its databases and applications in the process an affecting most of its network.

The ransomware caused the company’s website and electricity vending systems to go offline, preventing customers from paying bills. Possibly unique to South Africa, some City Power customers prepay for electricity units rather than after the electricity is delivered. With the systems to prepay for electricity offline, those customers lost access.

As of Thursday evening, most of the company’s systems remained offline as City Power scrambled to find ways to restore services.

#Update City Power has been hit by a Ransomware virus. it has encrypted all our databases, applications and network. Currently our ICT department is cleaning and rebuilding all impacted applications.^GR

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) July 25, 2019

“The Johannesburg Power attack highlights again that ransomware isn’t just a costly inconvenience,” Brian Vecci, field chief technology officer at security software firm Varonis Systems Ltd., told SiliconANGLE. “File systems being locked down can prevent an organization from transacting business.”

He added that it’s also no secret why municipalities are being increasingly targeted. “It takes investment in security staff and modern technology that includes analytics and automation in order to detect, prevent, and quickly recover from ransomware and utilities and local governments are increasingly unable to keep up,” he said.

Incidents like this are likely to proliferate, warned Ilia Kolochenko, founder and chief executive officer of security firm ImmuniWeb.

“Cities, and especially their infrastructure sites, are usually a low-hanging fruit for unscrupulous cybergangs,” he said. “These victims will almost inevitably pay the ransom as all other avenues are either unreliable or too expensive.”

Indeed, said Richard Gold, head of security engineering at risk protection firm Digital Shadows Ltd., local governments often  don’t have good backups or an incident response process in place but have enough sensitive data and enough resources to pay up.

“What the Johannesburg attacks highlights, however, is that there is a real human cost to these attacks,” Gold said. “A quick look at Twitter threads show how people are really affected by this outage, including families with small children and other vulnerable populations.”

Photo: Chris7cn/Wikimedia Commons