The city has gone through a deliberate process to restore its network, and the mayor thanked Fire Chief Ginny Cranor, the city’s incident commander, and the city’s IT team for “working with timeliness and responsiveness to every challenge that has been provided to us.”
He ticked off what is working:
- No interruptions to 911, police, fire and airport,
- Port continues to operate as normal, and
- Employee email is working, and
- 311 is back up and fully operational.
“We are working with alternate phone numbers, and as you can imagine, minute by minute, hour by hour we continue to try to get our additional systems back up in place,” Mayor Reeves said. “I want everyone to know that I’m asking the same questions you are, and we want to offer solutions to the people of Pensacola. And as we’ve learned with each briefing, we certainly have the right people in place to investigate and restore our services, and my job right now is to let the experts do theirs, and so that’s what we continue to do. “
The city did learn from the 2019 ransomware incident. He said, “We were able to shut down our system rather quickly to mitigate any possible harm to more systems. We also have viable backups, which are helping us get operations back to normal.”
Reeves said it was too early to determine if any citizens’ information had been leaked. “Certainly, we have protocol in place when that becomes apparent, but it’s too early to say. We understand that that’s going to be the number one question and so again, we continue to get updates minute by minute, and when there’s definitive answer on that one way or the other, we’ll be providing that.”
He said that FDLE has been involved in the investigation, but it has not been determined whether the incident has risen to a criminal level. Reeves hasn’t heard of similar recent cyber-attacks on other municipalities.
The mayor has been getting two or three briefings a day on the situation, and the city will continue to release updates to the media. Departments have been told to be lenient on any deadlines impacted by the shutdown.