Suffolk Cyber Disruptions Continue

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More than a year after Suffolk suffered a ransomware attack that crippled its computer system, cyber issues continue to plague the county. Everything from a rodent chewing through a fiber optic cable to a 911 system shutdown attributed to a vendor has put Suffolk's IT problems at the top of incoming County Executive Edward Romaine's To-Do list.

"The county Internet and phones failed again today," Romaine reported on Friday. "They blamed it on an upgrade, but there was no notice of such. It's just another failure. The county and its IT Department are a mess; there’s a lot to clean up.”

Earlier in the week, Romaine sent a letter to Suffolk's chief information security officer asking for an audit of the county's computer operations. "I want to get us on the path to obtain cybersecurity insurance and assess the feasibility of putting operations in the Cloud as we did in Brookhaven," said Romaine, who will leave his position as town supervisor January 1 to take on his role as the county's top administrator. He has asked a special legislative committee investigating the September 2022 cyberattack to also look into the recent disruptions.

It was another bad week for county operations as the emergency 911 system went down for a few hours in an incident county officials blamed on failed Verizon equipment. A day before, an animal gnawed into an above-ground cable, shutting down the county's website and some of its services.

According to the legislature's presiding officer, Kevin McCaffrey, the fiber optic line had been severed in Hauppauge. "I know it's hard to believe, but that's what I'm being told," McCaffrey said. "It has since been repaired, and our website and all the other services that were affected due to that outage have been restored."

Comptroller John Kennedy said his staff had to scramble to keep his office going during the outage. "Our cash management team had to use a mobile hotspot to get online to complete their operating run," Kennedy said, noting that even a few hours of disruption puts his staff in a tight spot. "Missing a few hours puts us behind the eight ball; missing a half day and we're in trouble." Kennedy, an elected official responsible to the voters for the operations of his office, expressed concern over a recent bill by outgoing county Executive Steve Bellone that would consolidate cybersecurity authority into the Department of Information Technology. The measure was tabled by the legislators, saying they want to wait for the special committee's recommendations, expected to come out after Bellone leaves office.

The report is expected to pinpoint how the hackers gained access to the county system and what measures need to be implemented to protect Suffolk in the future. The assessment may settle the controversy over assertions by the Bellone administration that the cyberthieves came in through the county clerk's office, while staffers there blame Bellone's IT department for the breach.