[THEHILL] Baltimore’s emergency dispatch system reportedly faced a cyberattack over the weekend, causing officials to manually handle emergency calls while its automated program was temporarily shut down.Officials learned about the "limited breach" against the city’s computer network on Sunday morning, Baltimore's chief information officer Frank Johnson told The Baltimore Sun.
An unidentified hacker reportedly disrupted the network’s messaging functions within the computer-aided dispatch system.
Johnson told The Baltimore Sun that employees manually took over handling emergency calls to 911 and 311 until the system was back up and running. City officials mitigated the hack by isolating and taking offline the breached server, he said.
"This effectively means that instead of details of incoming callers seeking emergency support being relayed to dispatchers electronically, they were relayed by call center support staff manually," Johnson told the newspaper.
Baltimore is the second U.S. city to recently face a cyberattack, after Atlanta faced a ransomware attack earlier this month that affected a range of the city’s services, like bill collection operations.