State, city and private bank computer sites appear to have escaped damage from the coordinated #OpUSA cyberattack by so-called "hacktivists" Tuesday, despite this past weekend’s breach of the Honolulu Police Department’s former HPD Alerts server that resulted in the theft of the names, cellphone numbers and email addresses of some 3,500 subscribers.
Meanwhile, HPD officials stressed that its Nixle account was not compromised and that the attack hit only the completely separate HPD Alerts pilot project that ran for several weeks but had not been used since mid-April.
Sanjeev "Sonny" Bhagowalia, the state’s chief information officer, said there did not appear to be a noticeable increase in the number of hacking attempts or scans of state agency sites Tuesday, which #OpUSA organizers had declared as the day for hackers to disrupt the websites of U.S. government agencies and banks.
But one state agency, which he would not identify, was subjected to a sustained series of unauthorized access attempts Tuesday from a location in Eastern Europe, Bhagowalia said. State information technology officers were able to ward off the attacks, he said. It’s unclear whether that sustained attack was connected to the #OpUSA effort.
The state’s various computer systems see about 60,000 unique unauthorized attempts to access its systems each day, he said.
Additionally, the state systems are subjected to about 1 million scans from parties probing for weaknesses in the system, he said.
State IT officers were alerted to be on the lookout for possible cyberattacks last week after learning about the #OpUSA effort, which appears to be the work of hackers in the Middle East seeking to gain attention for their opposition to U.S. military policies in the region.
City spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said there did not appear to any "abnormal activity" with the city’s various computer servers Tuesday.
Information technology officials were "monitoring the server logs and the firewall, and they did not detect any abnormal activity."
IT staffers were "watching extra closely" because of the attack against HPD and the #OpUSA date.
Ed Pei, executive director of the Hawaii Bankers Association, said IT teams from all Hawaii financial institutions were on high alert Tuesday and found no data breaches. "Naturally, all the banks have safeguards in place but they were extra diligent," he said. "This is a good reminder for us to review all our safety measures."
BOTH HPD and the city Department of Emergency Management issued notices via email and text messages, as well as on Facebook and websites, to Nixle subscribers emphasizing that their information was not compromised because Nixle operates independently from HPD.
HPD urged Nixle users to remain with the program.
Nixle, like HPD Alerts, was designed to notify subscribers about events affecting large numbers of people including major road closures and impending natural disasters.
HPD has approximately 12,000 Nixle subscribers, while Emergency Management has about 20,800 subscribers.
Emergency Management spokesman John Cummings III said the number of EM subscribers actually increased from last week through Tuesday by about 60, despite the news of the HPD breach.
