Until November, Alert Long Beach was operated on a platform via a third-party notification service called OnSolve CodeRED, according to a Tuesday, Dec. 9, city news release. OnSolve CodeRed was recently acquired by risk management company Crisis24, and rebranded as just CodeRED.
But on Nov. 21, CodeRED sent a notice to Long Beach that the old OnSolve CodeRED platform was the target of a cyber attack by an organized cyber criminal group, putting its users’ personal information at risk, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords used to create profiles.
“The legacy platform in which Alert Long Beach operated was taken offline by Crisis24 and will remain offline indefinitely,” Luis Valdez, a representative for the city’s Department of Disaster Preparedness & Emergency Communications, said on Wednesday, Dec. 10.
The legacy version of Alert Long Beach had about 25,000 registered contacts, Valdez said. Of those contacts, around 9,000 had created an account with a password. Anyone who had an account with Alert Long Beach, and used the same password for other personal or business accounts should change those passwords immediately, the city said.
The cyber attack, according to a frequently asked questions page on the city’s website, only impacted the old Alert Long Beach platform and didn’t involve any other city platforms or technology.
Information like dates of birth and social security numbers were not accessed during the attack, the city’s news release said, since the Alert Long Beach platform didn’t ask users for that information.
In a letter to the city about the incident, Crisis24 said there’s nothing to currently indicate that the organized cyber crime group published the breached information online — but said it could still be leaked.
With the old Alert Long Beach platform offline indefinitely, Long Beach is exploring other options to host the service, including Crisis24’s new platform, which was unaffected by the cyber attack, Valdez said.
“We are expediting this evaluation process. At this time, we have contingencies in place with local and state partners should we need to issue wireless emergency alerts,” Valdez said. “We also would like to add that the city of Long Beach is not completely reliant on Alert Long Beach to alert and notify our residents and (we) have redundancies in place.”
Those other emergency alert contingencies, Valdez said, include public advisories, social media, door-to-door canvassing by Long Beach’s Community Emergency Response Team volunteers, and public service announcements via police and fire vehicles and helicopters.
People who may have been impacted can contact Crisis24 at crsupport@crisis24.com or 866-939-0911.
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