Cybersecurity agents from the State Police, FBI, Homeland Security and others are assisting New Orleans' IT specialists in scrubbing over 4,000 computers at City Hall and across town of malware from Friday's cyber attack.
"They're really just unmatched in their knowledge of this stuff," says Robert Allen a cyber security specialist. "These are your subject matter experts. They are basically trained and supported, these people are about as smart it comes."
Allen says cyber criminals like the ones who launched Friday's attack are not to be taken lightly, "You get somebody who knows their way around a computer system they can cause significant damage to your infrastructure."
According to the City's top IT person, it appears the attackers were phishing, sending emails to city employees in the hopes one of them would enter their username and password. Once they got that information, they would've been able to do untold harm to the system.
"This is getting to be something as simple as they detected a probe or something along those lines," Allen says crediting the City's own IT personnel in tracking the early stages of the attack. "Once they figure out exactly what happened, then they make a determination on what systems are infected. Each computer will have to be inspected."
And with more than 4,000 computer to look at, that's why many City departments are offline, including the Municipal and Traffic Courts.
Allen says it all boils down to one minor slip up that could bring down an entire computer network, infect thousands of computer and put the City at danger of having its information held for ransom: "It's the end user. You can have the greatest firewall system, you can have the greatest antivirus system out there but if you open up a suspicious email or go to a suspicious website or something along those lines--don't open up those emails. If I get an email from somebody I don't know and I get an attachment or something like that, it automatically goes to junk."