I once took an interest in ethical hacking "courses" that existed around the net. Things got really complicated really fast and I think that real "hacking" is reserved for people that either have autism or were there when the internet was becoming a thing and can understand the ins and outs of how it works without really needing to research it. I had an opportunity to become one of the latter because when I was in college I was quite interested in computers and learned about them in great detail even though it was not required of me as far as my curriculum was concerned.
As many say though: Life got in the way and now I am so far out of the loop so to speak that I can't even fathom what it takes in order to hack major institutional systems the likes of which the government would have.
If you were going to hack them though, I don't really understand why you would try to do something that benefits no one such and forcing all the municipal lights to stay on all day long but that is exactly what a group of people called a "ransomeware group" did in Leicester, UK, not that long ago.
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It hasn't been pointed out who committed the cyber attack and the silence on this issue can only mean that the people responsible were much better at what they were doing than the people in charge of the municipal computer systems. I can only presume that the group demanded payment of some sort or they were not going to give control back to the people who were operating the system. This must be quite frustrating to a municipality and while I am not a fan of wasting electricity I have to admit that I kind of applaud when anyone inconveniences the government, because the government would not hesitate to inconvenience you if they have the chance.
It was about a week of all the streetlights being on in the entire area controlled by that particular grid and when asked by residents or the media, the officials were very stand-offish about offering up any information about what happened. This is another thing I love/hate about government: When they are wrong about something - and they frequently are - they will almost never EVER simply admit they were / are wrong but rather, give non-answers about something even when it is a situation like being hacked which obviously isn't their fault.
They probably don't want to ever seem at all vulnerable even though the now rather silent group Anonymous has shown the world that they are capable of shutting down almost anything, anywhere.
What I would love to know and I am sure no one at the government offices would ever admit on the record is whether or not they finally capitulated and paid the ransomware group or if they were actually intelligent enough to sort the situation out on their own. I suppose it could go either way but seeing as how the problem exited for a week, it must have been a rather complicated one.
I know a few people that work in the higher levels of digital security and they tell me stories about how the truly gifted programmers out there tend to work for private industry and the extremely gifted ones don't work for anyone at all and tend to keep their identity a secret. Almost none of the really gifted people with these skills work for the government because they are not appreciated, are even abused, and don't receive the amount of money that they believe they are worth. I suppose that makes sense since outside of politicians, most government jobs pay considerably less than their private sector counterparts.
This isn't much of a story I know, but it is kind of funny that a group of hackers would target something so seemingly insignificant as the computerized lighting systems of a city.
