Alabama state and city governments grapple with pair of cyber incidents

A cyberattack caused intermittent “disruptions” for websites of multiple Alabama government agencies on Wednesday, in an incident that had state officials working throughout the day to defend their networks from hackers, a spokesperson for Alabama’s Office of Information Technology told CNN.

A cyberattack caused intermittent “disruptions” for websites of multiple Alabama government agencies on Wednesday, in an incident that had state officials working throughout the day to defend their networks from hackers, a spokesperson for Alabama’s Office of Information Technology told CNN. “[W]e understand that the disruptions were initially widespread across state services, and those effects have diminished throughout the day as we have worked with our vendors to counter the denial-of-service attack,” said the spokesperson, Jeremy Ward. There was no breach of government networks or data stolen in the cyberattack, according to the office of Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, which said the attack began Tuesday afternoon. It is, however, an example of how hackers half a world away can use rudimentary techniques to send American state and local officials scrambling to defend their computer systems. The incident came as one of Alabama’s largest cities, Birmingham, dealt with an apparently separate computer network issue that has caused service issues for days. “A disruption of the city’s computer network” affected transactions involving licensing, taxing and permitting, the City of Birmingham said in a March 6 statement. A week later, there has been no public update from the city. Birmingham’s Office of Public Information did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday.