Hackers took down City of Potsdam servers

The city ​​of Potsdam, Germany, suffered a major cyber attack. Government servers have been shut down, but thankfully none of its emergency services have been affected.

Potsdam is the capital and largest city in the German state of Brandenburg. It directly borders the German capital Berlin and is part of Berlin’s Brandenburg metropolitan area. With a population of over 100,000, it was the place where the famous Potsdam Conference was held at the end of World War II.

It is understood that as of now, the Potsdam city government has not provided detailed information about the attack, but German reporter Hanno Böck reported that the Citrix ADC server on the government network may be affected by the CVE-2019-19781 vulnerability. Some experts noticed that the attacker had tried to use the vulnerability to retrieve data from the government server and install malicious software from outside.

The mayor of the city, Mike Schubert, issued a statement after the incident, saying that for security reasons, after discovering that the government server was invaded, he immediately planned to disconnect the system from the Internet and put it offline to respond to illegal network attacks and control infection and prevent data leakage. And said that relevant government departments are working hard to ensure that the affected management system is reopened as soon as possible to ensure that they can return to normal daily life as soon as possible.

Currently, Potsdam has hired external IT security companies and IT forensics experts to investigate the attack.