Merrill: State To Help Towns Beef Up Cyber Protections

Employees in the Hamden Town’s Clerk’s Office were able to prepare absentee ballots on their newly reopened computers Friday afternoon after a computer virus shut them down for a week.

Thanks goodness, a visiting Secretary of the State Denise Merrill told them, this didn’t happen on Election Day.

Merrill stopped by the Hamden Government Center on Friday to thank town employees for responding and adapting to a computer virus that shut down the town’s computer system for the last week. She stood talking with Town Clerk Vera Morrison, whose computer system had just been reopened.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we’re worried about, especially as we get near even a local election, which this is this year,” said Merrill in an interview with the Independent (shown in above video). ​“You’re stopped in your tracks. You’re not able to get the absentee ballots out to people.”

In September, Merrill, along with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, called on the federal government to provide more funding for election security. It was the day before the municipal primaries. Though they said they were not worried that cyber security would be an issue in the Sept. 10 primary, they said that more preparations need to be made before the 2020 presidential election.

Merrill said the virus in Hamden is a reminder of the danger that cyber-attacks can pose for towns and cities in Connecticut.

Many towns, she said, are not equipped to deal with cyber-attacks on their own.

“What we’re doing is we’re trying to provide towns with some resources so that they can beef up their own local security,” she said.

In 2018, the state got a $5 million grant from the federal government to strengthen cybersecurity. ​“We’re going to dedicate some of that for grants to towns,” she said, ​“because I think they’re the ones that need it, because your system is as vulnerable as its weakest point.”

Though the Hamden attack did not come on Election Day, and the town’s IT crew has managed to get many departments back up and running, Merrill said that a similar attack could be much worse if it had been timed differently.

“My nightmare is this happens on Election Day, and unfortunately in Connecticut we only have one Election Day — a particular beef of mine, I guess. I want more days of voting, and that would help us if something like this happened,” she said.

Hamden is not the only Connecticut town to be hit by a cyberattack in 2019. In June, the Wolcott school district suffered a ransomware attack in which hackers demanded $12,000, according to the Hartford Courant’s Slade Rand. In 2018, the Middletown school district received a similar attack.