Bucharest District 1 City Hall's IT system was blocked on Tuesday, September 13, by what seems to be a cyber attack.

The City Hall said in a press statement that “starting 14:00, the District 1 City Hall’s activity was shut down because of a computer virus that blocked the institution’s IT system.”

District 1 mayor Dan Tudorache told local Digi24 that he had notified the Directorate for Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) about this problem. Moreover, according to him, the cyber attack hypothesis was confirmed.

“We hope to solve this problem in a few days. I’m worried about recovering the database, that’s important,” Tudorache said.

“I can’t tell you right now to what extent the database has been affected, and if we can recover the data that got deleted until we managed to shut down the computers,” he added.

District 1 residents are advised to go directly to the City Hall headquarters to solve the problems they might have.

The incident came just a few days after ING Bank Romania shut down its entire electronic payment processing system due to some technical issues. The situation, which was caused by a fire drill that went wrong, affected about one million ING clients in Romania.

ING later announced that it would return all the fees paid by its customers who withdrew cash from other banks after its technical system crushed.

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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com