Suffolk County officials say they are struggling to get their computer systems back to normal after the county was the victim of a cyberattack.
The attack, which took place last week, has vastly affected the county’s police department and traffic court with keeping records. While county departments are open, the shutdown has also caused emails to not work. Their website is also down, and they have gone back to phones, fax and paper.
“It took 15 years to develop this amazing program that is done through the internet,” executive director of the Suffolk County Crime Victim’s Center Laura Ahern told News 12. “So now we are back to pen and paper.”
Ahearn says their organization gets immediately digitally notified about crimes as they are reported. They are still getting referrals, but if there is a high-profile crime, they get called immediately by police and now they are calling the various precincts every day for the reports on the lesser crimes.
“Nonprofits that are smaller, that rely upon that check every month, they are going to be the ones that are impacted the most,” she added.
County Executive Steve Bellone in a statement said, “The County’s Information Technology Department has spearheaded an enterprise-wide effort to evaluate the impact of this cyber-incident to proceed with the safe and secure restoration of servers. These efforts continue and are prioritizing the protection and preservation of critical, sensitive and personal information. The ongoing system integrity evaluation so far indicates that the network infrastructure is intact. Information posted yesterday on the dark web indicates that a threat actor has claimed responsibility for the current cyber incident in Suffolk County. The County’s incident response team is assessing this information and working closely with law enforcement agencies.”
News 12 reached out to Suffolk Comptroller John Kennedy, Jr. to find out if the shutdown is affecting the distribution of checks but was unsuccessful.
There is no timeline on when Suffolk’s computer systems will be functioning again.
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