A cyberattack on New York’s ethics commission last month is expected to keep lobbying and financial disclosure systems offline for about another week, officials said Saturday.
The Joint Commission on Public Ethics said it’s continuing its investigation into the attack on its web application server, but that it expects electronic lobbying reporting and financial disclosure statement systems to be back online by Friday. The attack was discovered by a suspicious activity alert Feb. 21, and all systems were taken offline as a precaution.
“We expect operations to resume next week, but we will not sacrifice security and integrity in the name of speed,” JCOPE Executive Director Sanford Berland said in a prepared statement.
It’s not clear who was behind the attack. It appears that it came in through U.S.-based IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. But JCOPE said “those easily could have been just the final stop on a global circuit.”
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The agency responsible for ensuring compliance with state ethics and lobbying rules said the investigation so far has shown that there was an attack on its so-called legacy lobbying filing system, which has not been used since 2018.
JCOPE said there is no direct evidence of any unauthorized access to user data or to the third-party credit card system.
