WASHINGTON — New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell had a cautionary message for a gathering of mayors Thursday.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when," they will also face a potentially crippling cyberattack in their cities.
A month after New Orleans declared a state of emergency over a cyberattack that shut down City Hall computers and slowed city business to a near halt, Cantrell addressed the issue during a gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“As mayors we know what we’re up against," she said, remaining light on the details of what happened in New Orleans. “At the end of the day I just want to encourage you all to lean forward in this."
She said it could be another six to eight months before the city's systems are fully restored.
The cyberattack afflicting New Orleans City Hall's computer networks will take months longer to completely fix than officials have previously …
New Orleans has a $3 million cybersecurity insurance policy that the city initiated in 2018, though officials have not detailed what that policy covers or who provides it. Last week, Cantrell said that the city has already spent $7.2 million responding to the attack.
Cantrell said some officials initially balked when she raised cybersecurity as a risk and questioned whether it should be considered a part of the city's critical infrastructure needs.
“I said, 'Like hell it isn’t,'” she said to the friendly crowd of mayors.
The city is cooperating with the FBI to investigate the attack, but officials haven't revealed who might have been behind it. Cantrell, who left the meeting shortly after speaking, didn't address the source during her address.
Cantrell's trip to Washington comes as the city is still working to recover from the Dec. 13 attack. And while she was out of town, another of the city's slow-simmering crises boiled over.
On Tuesday afternoon, a tarp that was hanging on the side of the collapsed Hard Rock hotel was blown from its moorings, exposing the remains of one of the workers killed when the building crumbled in October.
In a series of public statements, Cantrell administration officials aimed their ire at residents who were posting and sharing images of the remains. At the same time, social media erupted with criticism aimed at the building's developers as well as the city's handling of the collapse and the body that remains trapped 11 stories above Rampart Street.
The Hard Rock collapse, the recent explosion of a turbine at the Sewerage & Water Board and the after-effects of the cyberattack have taken up much of the city's attention in recent weeks.
The cyberattack began after an employee apparently responded to an email seeking credentials to access the city's system. Those credentials were then used to try to inject the malicious ransomware into the city's networks. No requests for ransom were received, though software did try to infiltrate the city's servers.
"We didn't get hit with a ransom," Cantrell said during the conference Thursday, adding the city had also been spared from data loss because it had begun transferring information to cloud servers. "We were able to not lose any data."
Gloss