Source: Energy & Management Powernews, 07 January 2022
Those who have become the target of a hacker attack feel transported back to the days of fax, mountains of paper and filing cabinets. Stadtwerke Wismar will soon be back in the digital.
Almost four months after a cyberattack, Stadtwerke Wismar is on the verge of a full return to normality. At the end of January, the utility from the Baltic coast wants to have its IT systems back to the usual state, a spokeswoman for the municipal utility told our editors in response to a query.
On September 28, 2021 (still) unknown persons had gained access to the computer system in Wismar. They used an encryption Trojan and thus made many digital contents inaccessible. This rendered the municipal utility unable to act, especially in the commercial sectors. The deactivated sectors expressly did not include the supply of energy and water. As part of risk prevention, the municipal utilities have been operating their technical systems via separate systems for some time.
In addition to the authorship of the hacker attack, it is equally unclear what purpose it served. According to the spokeswoman, no ransom demand has been received in Wismar to date. The situation was quite different at Technische Werke Ludwigshafen (TWL), which was supposed to pay a double-digit million sum at the beginning of 2020 to get 36,411 customer data records released again. TWL did not allow itself to be blackmailed, whereupon the hackers published the captured data on the Darknet.
In Wismar, managing director Andreas Grzesko had already been able to announce after six weeks that the systems had been restored to "stable emergency operation." By the beginning of November, about half of the processes were digital again. These included invoicing and changing customer data. Grzesko's announcement that "we can pay our bills" was somewhat curious. This had nothing to do with previously tight cash, but with the paralyzed access to electronic payments.
The establishment of new IT structures "on the greenfield", i.e. from scratch, is now 85% complete, the spokeswoman said. This gives rise to the hope of being able to switch from stable emergency operation to normal operation by the end of this month.
Author: Volker Stephan