Everett City Hall has been closed to the public since Tuesday after the city discovered what it calls a cybersecurity incident in its internal network on the evening of Sunday, September 6. The building stayed shut Wednesday and Thursday. As of Friday morning, the city’s website carried no notice beyond the one covering Thursday, and no reopening date had been announced.
The city says it found the problem at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the night before Labor Day, and brought in its own IT staff, outside cybersecurity professionals and the Everett Police Department to investigate. It has not said what kind of attack it was, whether any data was taken, or whether anyone has demanded a ransom. No criminal group has publicly claimed the attack.
“Our priority is to ensure the security of our systems and infrastructure while also investigating the full scope of the incident,” Mayor Robert J. Van Campen said in the city’s first statement Monday. “We know a City Hall closure creates an inconvenience for our residents, and we appreciate their patience while our team works through this.” By Tuesday the message was that “our IT professionals and investigators are working around the clock to restore City operations as quickly and safely as possible.”
What is open and what is not
Police, fire, 911, the Department of Public Works, the public schools and the public libraries have all operated normally through the week. The school department runs on a separate network. “Thankfully, this breach did not impact the Everett Public Schools, which has separate networks from the city and will operate as usual this week,” Superintendent William D. Hart told Boston 25 News.
Online bill payment and other transactions handled by outside vendors have kept working, because those systems are not on the city’s network.
What went dark was the paperwork side of city government. The city moved a skeleton crew to the Connolly Center at 90 Chelsea Street, which has been open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the Treasurer/Collector, Assessor, City Clerk, Engineering, Auditing, Procurement, Inspectional Services, Housing Assistance and Parking. Parking for visitors is in the stadium lot on Spring Street, and the back entrance is accessible. Residents with questions are told to call 311. The city says City Hall will reopen “when cybersecurity and technology professionals determine that affected systems can be used safely.”
The second hit in a year
This is not Everett’s first brush with a cyberattack. On December 1, 2025, the city told residents that CodeRED, the system it used to send snow emergency, evacuation and water outage alerts, had been hit in a nationwide attack on its vendor and that subscriber names, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords may have been exposed. The city urged anyone who reused that password elsewhere to change it. Hoodline, citing the Everett Independent, reported the city replaced CodeRED with Everbridge in January.
Everett was also not the only Massachusetts government knocked offline this week. Springfield Public Schools, with 23,000 students in more than 60 schools, closed Tuesday after what it described as a districtwide “Level 4 severe incident” involving malicious traffic on its network. Officials have said nothing to suggest the two events are connected.
A pattern across the state
Municipal networks have become a routine target. In Andover, a shared town and school network went down for four days beginning August 13, taking email and online bill payment with it just before the school year; a ransomware group calling itself WallStreet later listed Andover on its leak site, a claim the town has not confirmed. In Attleboro, city phones and email failed on November 20, 2025 and City Hall ran on paper for days while a forensic vendor rebuilt servers. In April, an attack on the Patriot Regional Emergency Communications Center disrupted systems for Pepperell, Ashby, Dunstable, Groton and other towns, though 911 call handling continued.
“I would expect to see more of these types of attacks in the future because it’s getting easier to actually get onto a network,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at the Halcyon Ransomware Research Center, told CBS Boston this week. Ryan Heidorn, a cybersecurity consultant, put the municipal problem more bluntly to Boston 25: “Typically, you are running with a limited staff and pressed with perhaps an unrealistic budget constraint relative to the magnitude of the data and the systems that municipalities need to protect.”
The state has started spending on the problem. In June the Healey administration awarded the first $1 million in Cybersecurity Remediation Grants to 20 cities, towns and school districts, ranging from roughly $6,000 to about $100,000 each, to fix weaknesses found in free state-run Cybersecurity Health Check assessments. The largest awards went to replacing old hardware. Separately, the MassCyberCenter’s $2 million Cyber Resilient Massachusetts grant pays for round-the-clock network monitoring by CyberTrust Massachusetts, which the center said in May now covers 25 organizations and 12,000 devices.
Whether Everett had taken part in any of those programs before Sunday, and what it will cost the city to recover, are questions the city has not yet answered. We will update this story when City Hall reopens or the city says more about what happened.
Sources: City of Everett notices posted September 7 and 8, 2026 and December 1, 2025; Boston.com, September 7; CBS Boston, Boston 25 News, The Boston Globe and Recorded Future News, September 8; Boston.com, September 9; Everett Independent, September 9, 2026 and December 3, 2025; Hoodline, September 8; Andover News; The Sun Chronicle and WJAR on Attleboro; Recorded Future News, April 3, 2026, on Pepperell; StateScoop and Government Technology, June 2026; MassTech Collaborative, May 13, 2026. Photo: Everett City Hall, June 2026, by 4300streetcar via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.