Greece, N.Y. (WHAM) — The Town of Greece issued a warning Tuesday advising residents not to open any emails from the town assessor’s office.
The town said an email account was compromised, and emails with attached phishing attempts were being sent to residents.
Molly Clifford, the town’s chief of staff, said cyber attacks are the way of the world now for organizations big and small.
“As these hacks go, it sort of regenerated through the email addresses in (the town assessor’s) address book,” Clifford said. “We caught it quickly.”
Clifford said the town was able to disable the link internally.
“We know she had some outside email addresses in her address book,” Clifford said. “So, unfortunately, some members of the public were impacted. We don’t know how many (were impacted) … but I don’t think it was large at this point.”
How many remains to be seen. Cybersecurity expert Paul Robinson, founder of Tempus Network, said if you see an email from the town assessor in your inbox from earlier this week, don’t open it. If you did click the link in one of the emails, take action.
“If you clicked on this and gave financial information, review your bank account, contact your financial institution, change passwords on your email address,” said Robinson.
Clifford said the prior town administration had no director of IT for four years, and the town is working on beefing up its own IT team.
Robinson said Greece needs to ensure it has some standard measures in place.
“Basic security controls, anomaly detections, email phishing campaigns that might come against an organization being able to identify those through technology, training, things of that nature,” Robinson said.
Clifford said the town’s IT team did go through security checks this week with the New York State Department of Homeland Security and is working on adding additional security.
“We really are serious about making sure that doesn’t happen again.”