Suffolk County on Long Island joined the ranks of those hit by a ransomware attack, and the results and impact are not surprising. One headline on September 13 somewhat said it all: “County IT systems crippled, with websites, email down, five days after discovery of cyberattack.” By yesterday, county officials were working to send out paper checks to pay county vendors, with Newsday reporting that nonprofits contracted to perform social services were a high priority for payment.
Then a ransomware team stepped out of the shadows to claim responsibility for the attack. Variously called ALPHV or “BlackCat,” they issued a post on their dark web leak site:
The Suffolk County Government was attacked. Along with the government network, the networks of several contractors were encrypted as well.
Due to the fact that Suffolk County Government and the aforementioned companies are not communicating with us, we are publishing sample documents extracted from the government and contractor network.
The total volume of extracted files exceeds 4TB.
Extracted files include Suffolk County Court records, sheriff’s office records, contracts with the State of New York and other personal data of Suffolk County citizens. We also have huge databases of Suffolk County citizens extracted from the clerk.county.suf. domain in the county administration.
The post was accompanied by screencaps of various files that appear to have been exfiltrated from county systems.
Visitors to the county’s website today will see this notice:
Following an alert of unusual activity on Thursday September 8th, 2022, out of an abundance of caution the County took aggressive containment measures, which included taking email and web-based services offline.
Below you will find contact information for the County’s various departments and agencies. For general inquiries please call Suffolk County 311 by dialing 311 or 631-853-6311.
Black cats are misunderstood, loving creatures. I don’t see how a cat could be the mastermind responsible for these shenanigans.