COLONIE — The town of Colonie’s computer system was down Friday due to a cyberattack, forcing many departments to run their operations offline, town officials said Friday, noting that systems should slowly start to come back online later in the day.
The attack was discovered Wednesday evening, and the town has not paid any ransom to the hacker, according to town spokesperson Sara Wiest.
Town Supervisor Paula Mahan said an integrated team of law enforcement and various state agencies has been working to respond to the incursion. She added that all the town’s data was backed up and many of the departments were able to work without using the computer system.
Wiest, who is retiring from her job Friday, said all departments should have access to the system by early next week. She said the town is still "trying to determine the exact nature of attack.” The town is not sure if it's a ransomware attack or a "denial of services" attack, which is when an attacker makes a network unavailable to legitimate users. Wiest said to her knowledge, this is the first time the town has experienced such a hack.
The town sent out a news release about the attack Friday morning — but was forced to send it out via fax because the email systems were down.
On Friday, there was no indication that personal data of any kind has been compromised, the release states. All public health and safety services are functioning normally, despite the computer system shutdown. Wiest said emergency services keeps its data on a different system, so it was not compromised during the breach.
About a week ago, Albany County Airport Authority's computer system was also hacked, and the airport had to pay a ransom. The amount wasn't disclosed, but airport officials said it was "under six figures." Colonie officials don’t know if there is any connection between the two incidences.
The City of Albany experienced an attack last spring that cost the city $300,000 to repair destroyed servers, upgrade user security software, purchase firewall insurance and make other improvements to better protect the city’s systems.
“These types of situations happen in a lot of different places and municipalities and they appear to be similar,” Mahan said. “It’s happening in a lot of places and it’s something we have to get used to.”
These attacks are becoming increasingly more common. More than 40 municipalities in the U.S. have been the victims of cyberattacks in 2019, ranging from major cities such as Baltimore and Laredo, Tex., to smaller towns like Lake City, Fla, according to a New York Times report.
John Flory, vice president and partner at TAG Solutions, an Albany-based security firm said he’s seen an uptick in cyberattacks on municipal governments in the last two years.
“Municipalities are a definite draw (for cyber attacks), and there are a lot of reasons,” Flory said. “They are generally understaffed, they have older technologies and they’ll pay their ransom.”
Some steps groups can take to prevent hacks is to frequently test their systems, train their staff, encrypt data and create multi-step authentication logins. Above all, Flory said it’s crucial to make sure data is backed up.
“If they don’t have proper back-ups, and they are not testing them, it’s going to take a lot longer to recover,” Flory said.
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January 18, 2020 at 04:16AM
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