Suffolk County starting to restore online services amid months-long cyberattack
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. -- Suffolk County has been suffering through a massive cyberattack for months, but progress has been made to restore security.
"The clerk's office has been deemed clean and we are able to start to restore online services beginning with the county website," said County Executive Steve Bellone.
Social security numbers of 26,000 county employees and drivers license numbers of 470,000 were exposed or accessed.
"The unfortunate reality is that the cybercriminals had more access to the clerk's network than county IT ever did," said Bellone.
There's a new county clerk. Its head of information technology was put on leave with pay following the breach.
"We were a victim of a crime," said Deputy County Executive Lisa Black. "I think that we're going to be sharing a lot of that information with other counties across the state."
Would paying the proposed $2.5 million ransom have saved the county time, money and rippling effects?
Experts said even if ransomware actors provide keys to unlock the data, hackers can still sell what they've stolen after ransom is paid.
"Something on the dark web. Some kind of a sale that's kind of like a chop-shop. They take the data and they make it more valuable to different parties," said Dr. Michael Nizich, a professor at New York Institute of Technology. "An attack like this is so damaging and so deep that I think it's all about recovery now."
"This county is not going to make that mistake again. We're never going back to a segregated environment," said Bellone.
All departments now have county IT visibility and new, state-of-the-art firewall protection is in.
The fallout is still to be measured.
