Cleveland City Hall temporarily closed its doors to the public this week after a significant 'cyber incident' impacted the city's systems on Sunday.
Dominic Paluzzi, co-chair of McDonald Hopkins' Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Practice Group, was featured in News 5 Cleveland's report on the incident. He explained to reporter, Nadeen Abusada, the growing threat that cyberattacks pose to public entities during a newscast about the city's ongoing 'cyber incident.'
An excerpt from the story is below:
Across the nation, cyberattacks on public entities are becoming a trend; McDonald Hopkins, a business advisory and corporate law firm, said in 2023, they saw several hundred cyber security incidents.
"Threat actors have started to realize that they have sensitive data, they have employee personal information, they have resident data, utility payments, bank account information, credit card information, and so there is value to that in the threat actors, if not just for them to use and misuse that data, but to actually extort the municipality the entity with that data," said Dominic Paluzzi member and co-chair of the Data Privacy and Cybersecurity practice at McDonald Hopkins.
He said cyber events occur when an unknown party shows suspicious activity that can cause an interruption within the system. Adding it doesn't always mean a data breach, but when it happens, it's important to disconnect all systems and then investigate.
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