Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Eight U.S. Cities Impacted in New Series of Click2Gov Breaches

More than 20,000 records from eight cities across the United States have been compromised in a new wave of Click2Gov breaches, Gemini Advisory reports.

Developed by Superion (now CentralSquare Technologies), Click2Gov provides cities with a self-service bill-pay portal for utilities, community development, and parking tickets.

More than 20,000 records from eight cities across the United States have been compromised in a new wave of Click2Gov breaches, Gemini Advisory reports.

Developed by Superion (now CentralSquare Technologies), Click2Gov provides cities with a self-service bill-pay portal for utilities, community development, and parking tickets.

Breaches at Click2Gov customers were first spotted in October 2017, and security researchers said last year that they were performed by a previously unknown threat actor.

In December last year, Gemini Advisory said that over 300,000 payment card records from dozens of cities across the United States and Canada were compromised in a breach at Click2Gov between 2017 and late 2018.

Now, the company reveals that over 20,000 records from eight cities in five different states have been compromised in a new wave of attacks that started in August 2019. Cardholders in all 50 states were affected, as many remotely transacted with the Click2Gov portal in affected cities.

Six of these cities were compromised in the initial breach as well. Although many of the cities impacted in the initial attack patched their systems to prevent future compromise, attackers have found new means to breach them, it seems.

“Analysts confirmed that many of the affected towns were operating patched and up-to-date Click2Gov systems but were affected nonetheless. Given the success of the first campaign, which generated over $1.9 million in illicit revenue, the threat actors would likely have both the motive and the budget to conduct a second Click2Gov campaign,” Gemini says.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Gemini says they attempted to contact several of the eight towns about the attacks and that most did not respond. Those that did, however, confirmed that their Click2Gov utility payment portals were breached. Others took the portals offline although they did not respond to Gemini’s outreach.

The new wave of attacks shows that despite patched systems, the Click2Gov portal remains vulnerable and that cybercriminals are willing to repeatedly target the same victims. Thus, organizations are advised to regularly monitor systems for breaches and to always keep up to date on patches.

Related: Click2Gov Attacks on U.S. Cities Attributed to Previously Unknown Group

Related: No Ransom Paid in Recent Attack, Texas Says

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...