North Carolina's water and sewer service suffers cyber attack

On October 15, 2018, the CEO of Onslow Water and Sewer Authority (ONWASA), Jeffrey Hudson, reported that one of his employees in the IT department had discovered in the early hours of October 4, 2018, a sophisticated ransomware attack affecting their systems and, although he proceeded to disconnect the systems from the Internet, by then the virus had already spread.

The used virus was Emotet, a polymorphic banking trojan that spreads through a spam botnet whose main function is to download and launch other types of malware, in this case a ransomware type called Ryuk.

According to the company, their customers' information has not been compromised, but they do report that they have had to restore several databases that had been encrypted. Water and wastewater service has never been interrupted.