City of Attleboro Breach Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (CIT0132101112125)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the City of Attleboro breach identified under incident ID CIT0132101112125.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of City of Attleboro's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/city-of-attleboro, the number of followers: 578, the industry type: Government Administration and the number of employees: 295 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 763 and after the incident was 737 with a difference of -26 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on City of Attleboro and their customers.

On 02 November 2023, City of Attleboro, Massachusetts disclosed Cybersecurity Incident (likely ransomware or disruptive attack) issues under the banner "Cybersecurity Incident in Attleboro, Massachusetts".

City officials and police in Attleboro, Massachusetts, are investigating a cybersecurity incident that has taken several of the city’s IT systems offline.

The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Phone lines (non-emergency, excluding 911 and police/fire business lines), Citywide email services and Multiple IT systems (unspecified).

In response, teams activated the incident response plan, and began remediation that includes Investigation ongoing to identify cause and restore services, and stakeholders are being briefed through Public statement issued (2023-11-02) with guidance for residents to use emergency (911) and non-emergency business lines (police: 508-223-2950, fire: 508-399-8693).

The case underscores how Active (cause identification and service restoration in progress), with advisories going out to stakeholders covering Residents advised to use 911 for emergencies and designated business lines (police: 508-223-2950, fire: 508-399-8693) for non-emergencies.

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.

Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with moderate to high confidence (70%), with evidence including disrupted critical IT infrastructure, forcing several municipal systems offline, and citywide email services are completely down and Valid Accounts (T1078) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating targeted disruption of government services implying possible abuse of legitimate credentials. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with moderate to high confidence (80%), with evidence including cybersecurity Incident (likely ransomware or disruptive attack), and prolonged outage of essential communication channels and Endpoint Denial of Service: Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004) with moderate to high confidence (85%), with evidence including disrupted critical IT infrastructure, forcing several municipal systems offline, and citywide email services are completely down. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating citywide email services are completely down suggesting possible disabling of security/email gateways. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services: Remote Desktop Protocol (T1021.001) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating multiple IT systems (unspecified) disrupted, implying internal movement across city infrastructure. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.