Fire Rescue Victoria, a fire and rescue service in Australia that offers firefighting, rescue, HAZMAT, and emergency medical response services, has been hit by a cyberattack.
A massive outage has affected the firefighter server provider and has limited its operations. According to reports, Fire Rescue Victoria’s acting commissioner, Gavin Freeman, said in an interview that the exact parameters of what was hacked and how it happened are still unclear.
The IT systems within the organization set off an alarm about a possible intruding attempt. According to sources, the attack didn’t stop the entire operation, and the service could still respond to fires, but the organization has disabled some internal systems as a precaution. However, the incident currently does not directly point to a cyberattack.
At the time of writing, Freeman and the fire department were still looking into what breached the systems and what information would have been compromised. Security experts are also looking into the issues. “We have got a lot of people working on the investigation to determine it,” Freeman said, The Age reported.
The acting commissioner said that the fire trucks and crews could still be deployed in response to the incidents, and safety had not been compromised. However, they are looking into the issue that caused the IT alarms to go off, and what or who might have hacked into the systems.
The fire rescue company says it is too early to call an actual attack. However, the early stages of the investigation show that something interfered with their IT systems. Whether this is a data breach or a vulnerability within the company’s system is still determined.
As a precaution, the service’s phones, emails, websites, and other automated systems are down, and the regular service is still operational. This contains a program that unlocks station doors as soon as a computer receives a call-out.
