The arena where the Swiss Winegrowers' Festival is held in Vevey, Switzerland Photo: IC

A Swiss town acknowledged late Wednesday that it had underestimated the severity of a cyberattack, following reports that the personal data of the entire population was exposed online.

The small town of Rolle acknowledged last week that it had been the victim of a ransomware attack, and that data on some administrative servers had been compromised.

But the municipal government in the town of some 5,400 inhabitants insisted that only small amounts of data had been affected, and that all the information had been restored from backup copies.

The town administrative chief Monique Choulat Pugnale told the Swiss daily 24 hours at the time that it was "a weak attack," which only affected email servers that "did not contain any sensitive municipal data." 

But according to an investigation published by the Le Temps daily Wednesday, the attack first detected on May 30 had in fact been "massive."

The paper cited an unnamed cybersecurity expert saying it had taken him only 30 minutes to turn up thousands of Rolle municipal documents. 

The documents, he said "are personal and extraordinarily sensitive."

Rolle municipality acknowledged late Wednesday that it "underestimated the severity of the attack [and] the potential uses of the data."

AFP