The city of Las Vegas announced it has suffered a cyber attack that breached its computer systems, it is unclear whether any sensitive data was exposed.

Las Vegas officials say a cyber attack breached the city’s computer systems, the attack took place on Tuesday, but it wasn’t immediately clear if any sensitive data was exposed.

City spokesman David Riggleman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that City officials were informed of the breach around 4:30 a.m. and the IT department quickly launched the incident response procedures.

“The city is taking extensive steps to protect its systems,” Riggleman said. “We’re not aware of what that would be at this point. We’re still assessing that right now,” he added. “We don’t know that any of the data has left the city at this point.”

The city of Las Vegas faces an average of 279,000 attempts to breach its systems on a monthly basis. Officials pointed out that city networks receive about two million emails, attackers likely compromised the internal network of the city through a malicious email.

“a lot of people out there … are trying to open that cyber door,” according to Riggleman.

At the time of writing, the City was assessing whether any city or public data had been accessed by attacks.

Pierluigi Paganini