Cyber attack: Yarra Ranges Council email, phones down after network hack | crime

An outer east council has had its network brought down by cyber hackers and has been offline for almost a week. Here are the details.

Yarra Ranges Council network was hacked.

Cyber hackers are behind a seven-day network outage that brought Yarra Ranges Council network almost to a standstill.

While emails are back up and running at the outer east council, the systems have been down since Wednesday, November 11.

Yarra Ranges corporate services director Andrew Hilson said the council had experienced significant network issues across its phones and other systems.

“We can now confirm that the outage was caused by a cyber incident that effectively locked council’s core network servers,” Mr Hilson said.

“As a result, we have been unable to access some of our key systems, emails and landlines.”

He said the council understands other organisations had also been impacted by the same incident.

“Over the past few days we’ve been conducting extensive forensic research with industry experts to identify the cause, nature and extent of this incident,” Mr Hilson said.

“We are confident that the private data of our community members remains safe.”

He said work was continuing to test and restore systems as quickly and as safely as possible.

Services have are unavailable include some payments — including rates, planning, building and property certificates applications, pool registrations, animal registrations and requests.

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