Databases maintained by New York’s public watchdog agency have to shut down their systems after state information technology researchers discovered a malicious cyber-attack on its web servers.
The ethics watchdog, which regulates lobbying at the State Capitol reported last Friday evening that an investigation has been launched to determine the scope of the attack and the perpetrators behind the attack after it received an alert regarding suspicious activity on JCOPE’s network.
Following the attack, the Commission has shut down the systems as a precaution, including its lobbying application and financial disclosure statement online filing system.
JCOPE reported that the systems will remain shut down until the agency resume normal operations safely. As of the present, the Agency officials did not report anything regarding who was responsible for the attack. However, the agency said that they are planning to work with state law enforcement officials to investigate the attack.
“Our first and highest priority is the safety and integrity of the data entrusted to the Commission by the regulated community,” said JCOPE Executive Director Sanford Berland in a statement.
Following the attack, the public was not able to access the data about lobbyist expenditures. Lobbyists were kept from submitting their required records. JCOPE said that it will grant automatic extensions to the people who missed a deadline because of the outage.
Walter McClure, a JCOPE spokesperson added that "the outage also affects searches using the agency’s legacy lobbyist filing system, which was in use until 2019".
