The Potsdam city administration has announced the return to the Internet. Numerous services are to go online again next week, the city announced on Friday afternoon. E-mail communication with the city should be possible again from Wednesday, February 8th. A day later, on Thursday, February 9th, a large number of citizen services and administrative procedures that require an online connection to the Brandenburg state administration network should go online again. At the end of December, the Potsdam City Hall completely cut the Internet connections to its servers after information from security authorities about an impending cyber attack.
Several services possible again from Thursday
Procedures to be offered again include housing benefit processing, newborn and death registrations, maternity and paternity acknowledgments, and visa processing. The registration and certification of marriages should also be possible again from Thursday. In addition, identity cards, passports and children’s passports – also as temporary documents – as well as resident parking permits can already be applied for, the city hall announced.
However, appointments for the services can still not be requested online, the administration made clear. Appointments can be made on Tel.: (0331) 289 0 or via the general authority number 115. Service desks in the basement of the town hall are available for urgent inquiries without an appointment. According to the town hall, it is still not possible to register and deregister from residences.
There is also a special feature with vehicle registrations, the Potsdam registration office responsible for this was already hopelessly overloaded before the cyber crisis, so that the registration authority of the Potsdam-Mittelmark district in Werder (Havel) was the official alternative location. With the shutdown of the Potsdam server, however, approval for Potsdam was no longer possible there either. With the connection of the Potsdam town hall to the Brandenburg state administration network next Thursday, vehicle registrations via the Central Marche authority should again be possible. According to the administration, the city is working with the Federal Motor Transport Authority to be able to offer its own services in-house again.
More employees to work off the backlog
Mayor Mike Schubert (SPD) announced that additional capacities will be made available in the city administration in the coming weeks and months to process the backlog of processes: “I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people of Potsdam for their patience, who are so had to do without our online services for a long time. At the same time, I would like to thank my colleagues within the city administration, who are now also helping to get the city hall back on track completely online as quickly as possible.”
On December 29, 2022, after indications of a cyber attack, the administration took all of its IT systems offline. Shortly thereafter, it became apparent that the attack on the servers of the Potsdam city administration was part of a large-scale cyber attack by the criminal hacker network “Hive”. Authorities in Germany and the USA finally smashed the global hacker network. In the course of the indications of the large-scale attack, all municipal companies initially went offline. At the end of January, the first attempt was made to start up the systems again. After just one day, however, the city administration had to go completely offline again due to new irregularities. the municipal companies were able to start up their online connections again without any problems.
The city has now explained that the technical monitoring of all IT systems and end devices will remain close. “There is a permanent comparison of information with the connected networks, so that switching off again can only be expected in absolutely exceptional cases,” the administration asserted.
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