For the second week, Nevada continues to suffer the fallout from a massive cyberattack.
Officials took state-run websites offline on Sunday, August 24th, when they first noticed signs of the incursion. Since then, they’ve worked to create temporary workarounds to connect Nevadans with services and recovery updates.
However, it appears to be slow going.
During an August 28 press conference, Governor Joe Lombardo told reporters that state officials are working to get services back online.
"Over the last several days, our state has been responding to a cyber attack targeting Nevada's systems. While this incident has posed challenges, I want Nevadans to know one thing clearly. Our government and our partners acted quickly and effectively to secure the critical services our communities rely on."
Despite assurances from the governor, it remains unclear how long state-run systems will remain offline.
For Greg Moody, Director of UNLV Cybersecurity Program, the attack appears sophistcated which could take some time to completely understand.
"They got hit by something pretty smart, and they did a good response," said Moody. "They detected it. We have no idea how fast that detection occurred yet, because that requires investigation, and when they detected it, they said, 'Okay, we got a problem,' and they took stuff down. At least that stops the boat from leaking. Now, it's in dry dock.
One thing state officials have confirmed is that some data was stolen, but they refused to go into details about what or how much was taken.
According to Moody, it's just best to operate under the assumption that all of your data stored on the internet has already been accessed.
"There are too many things that we deal with that have been breached to assume that you are protected," said Moody. "What you need to do is just make sure that you can get your credit reports. If you see a huge dip all of a sudden and you didn't do anything, that's where you should be investigating to figure out who took your data and what they did with it?"
Guest: Greg Moody, director, UNLV Cybersecurity Program
