A ransomware attack hit the public safety network of Albany, Saratoga and Rensselaer counties at about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 16.
The breach did not affect the delivery of 911 service in Albany County, said Sheriff Craig Apple, but Computer Aided Dispatch was impacted.
As of Wednesday afternoon, all the servers and desktops in in all three counties were cleaned and the services are being rebuilt from backup systems.
Vendors and the New York Department of Homeland Security Office of Counter Terrorism Cyber Incident Response Team were on site to mitigate damage and to figure out how the hackers gained access.
Generally, a ransomware attack holds systems hostage until a demand is met. Last year, hackers demanded the Town of Colonie pay $400,000 to release its systems. The town, though, had all its data on a separate and distinct backup system and was able to reinstall the data to the main system. It took weeks to complete, but the town did not pay a ransom and it did not lose any data.
