The cyberincident served as a shutdown of city sites and internal portals of the Californian Hayward

The American town of Hayward, located in the state of California, with a population of about 160 thousand people at the time of the last census in 2020, discovered cybersecurity incident and intrusion into its computer networks last Sunday and, as a precaution, disabled access to its public website and related municipal online portals.

Now residents of the city cannot use city services via the Internet and are forced to make phone calls, postal services or visit certain city departments in person.

The cyber incident has reportedly severely impacted the city’s systems, although officials say emergency services such as 911 and medical services at local hospitals remain operational. It is worth noting that no violations of the personal information of city employees or ordinary citizens have yet been recorded. Who specifically attacked the city’s infrastructure is also not clear yet. The investigation into the cyberattack is still ongoing.

The city’s library services were also affected by the incident, with access to computers for public use to be unavailable until further notice. However, the Hayward Library remains open and its opening hours have not changed.

In recent months, various US cities, including Auckland , Dallas , Lowell And Augusta — have become victims of truly serious cyber incidents with encryption, data theft, accompanying extortion and the publication of confidential information of citizens in the public domain. If there really was no data leak in the case of Hayward, we can say that the city got off with little bloodshed. In the meantime, the motivation of hackers carrying out such attacks remains a big question mark.