HACLA notifies the public about a ransomware attack

The notorious LockBit ransomware gang once again claimed a cyberattack against its newest victim, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). Following this incident, the housing authority published a data breach notice stating that unauthorised entities had encrypted their computer systems.

HACLA is an LA-based state-chartered agency that helps low-income families and individuals with affordable housing services. The company also offers job training to people, aiming to help them improve their lives.

 

HACLA was forced to shut down its servers after learning of the data breach incident.

 

On December 31 last year, the housing authority found unauthorised access from unknown entities in their servers, which forced its IT team to shut down all their servers and subsequently launch an investigation.

After over a month of the investigation completed last February 13, the agency said that the threat actors had access to their systems between January 15, 2022, through December 31, 2022, indicating the long and well-hidden intrusion by a threat actor that could have collected numerous critical data from the organisation.

People are informed that the exposed data to the hackers could include full names, dates of birth, social security numbers, passport numbers, state ID numbers, driver’s licenses, military ID numbers, government-issued ID numbers, financial account numbers, credit/debit card numbers, health insurance data, and medical data.

The affected individuals are also given instructions on monitoring their accounts and reporting malicious cyberattack attempts to authorities should they occur. HACLA also advised people to place identity fraud alerts.

While the agency did not mention any threat group that had performed the attack, it has been discovered that the LockBit ransomware gang claimed to be the perpetrator. On the gang’s leak site, they uploaded file samples allegedly stolen from HACLA’s network on December 31 last year.

As of this article, the download link of HACLA’s leaked files is no longer working, thus implying that the incident had been mitigated. It could either be that the agency paid the ransom demands of the threat group or that they had executed a legal action against LockBit.