The forecast was provided during an update on end-of-year report provided last week during a Town Board meeting.
“Just today (Jan. 16, 2025) we realize that, again, something else came up from the data that was lost,” town Comptroller Tosca Sweeney said. “That’s all the employees’ records that … that has to be put in from 2023 through 2024.”
The breach was a ransomware attack but officials were never able to determine where culprits were or the amount they wanted because attempts to respond were unsuccessful.
Sweeney said the town was forced to delay installation of a different bookkeeping system.
“We were working on the financial software upgrading,” she said. “That is on hold right now … (we’re) still continuing to enter data.”
The attack was detected through a monitoring system and impacted all offices except for the Police Department and town court.
“We have not totally recovered from the effects of the cyber attack,” Supervisor James Quigley said. “Invariably as you go along, you’re going to (need) a document, you’re going to look for it, and it’s gone. You start over.”
In restoring the information about employees there were several steps needed to update bank records before the data could be entered.
“You had to make sure everything was exact to the penny,” Quigley said.
“That was a herculean effort,” he said. “It’s no different from what we’re doing with the Water Department billing, which we continue to have problems with. That system is much more complicated because you have 2,500 records that we restored from a database from March of 2023.”
The water accounts were also something that required dealing with carefully through an entire billing cycle.
“Some bills got sent to the wrong address, sent to the wrong people, had the wrong meter numbers on them, and had the wrong volumes listed on them,” Quigley said. “As people turned in their bills, they were corrected.”
Quigley said town staff has learned to think about where information can be found when faced with a necessary document.
“Every day there’s going to be one small piece of information that somebody needs that they can’t find,” he said. “But, in 99.9% of the time it’s fine. For example, for the last 15 years … we had scanned in every vendor invoice in the accounts payable system so if anyone wanted to go look for ancient history, they had access to it and we still had that information.”
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