Systems and phones now restored

Published on 01 December 2020

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All phones and systems have now been restored following the recent cyber incident.

Our Customer Experience team will continue to work through all enquiries and phones calls received during the outage.

We thank you for your continued patience and understanding.

We can now confirm that the outage was caused by a cyber incident that effectively locked Council’s core network servers. As a result, we have been unable to access some of our key systems, emails and landlines. We understand other organisations had also been impacted by the same incident.

We would like to assure you that Council data, including customer records, has not been compromised as a result of this incident.

Over the past few days we’ve been conducting extensive forensic research with industry experts to identify the cause, nature and extent of this incident. Work is continuing to test and restore our systems as quickly and as safely as possible.

Thanks for your continued patience and understanding as we work to rectify this issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened?

On Wednesday, 11 November, Council was hit by a cyber incident (hacking) which has impacted our network system and server.  

Was private customer data accessed?

We have conducting extensive forensic research with industry experts to identify the cause, nature and extent of the incident. We are confident that the private data of our community members remains safe.

Why are systems still offline?

We’re taking a very safe and measured approach with restoring our systems, ensuring that only authorised people have access to information and that enhanced security measures are in place to prevent a similar incident happening in future.

Email has now been restored and customers can again contact us at mail@yarraranges.vic.gov.au

Are Council’s Community Links still open?

Yes. All of our Community Links (Lilydale, Healesville, Yarra Junction, Monbulk and Upwey) are open for community members. Some services may not be available due to the network outage, but we are still able to process payments and will try to help with any enquiries you may have. 

I had a rates payment due that hasn’t come out of my account – what is happening with rates payments?

Due to technical issues, Council was unable to process the scheduled fortnightly rate direct debit for customers who pay this way (scheduled for Friday 13 November).

Scheduled payments were instead direct debited on 18 November 2020.

We are currently unable to receive emails however, if you email rates@yarraranges.vic.gov.au, we will respond to your emails as soon as our access is restored.

 

I’ve been trying to make a submission for a planning application being advertised, but I’m worried I’ll miss the deadline. What can I do?

Submission deadlines for planning applications currently being advertised will be extended until further notice. Further details on submission deadlines for individual applications will be available through ePlanning once the system is back up again. 

I have recently lodged a planning permit application. Is the system outage likely to impact the timeframes for processing?

Our planning officers will be working through a backlog of planning applications once our planning systems are up and running again. They will endeavour to process these as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience as we work through this backlog. Once ePlanning is accessible again, you will be able to check the status of your application.

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