Ocean county approves $224,000 it purchase to state contractor shutdown by crippling malware attack

Ocean County Approves $224,000 IT Purchase to State Contractor Shutdown by Crippling Malware Attack

by
July 7, 2022
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TOMS RIVER, NJ – The Ocean County Board of Commissioners approved two public contracts with SHI International Corp, to provide a public notification system for the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department and to upgrade network data switches in the county’s data center.

Combined, the projects are valued at $224,000.

On Sunday, SHI was the victim of a malware attack that has shut down company services for several days. As of Thursday, the company’s outage continues. At this time, it is not certain that public data was not compromised, but the company is continuing to investigate, along with the FBI.

The county also did not say whether or not any services provided by SHI were affected or if county data was compromised. SHI is a major state information technology vendor and service provider.

“Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, SHI was the target of a coordinated and professional malware attack. Thanks to the quick reactions of the security and IT teams at SHI, the incident was swiftly identified and measures were enacted to minimize the impact on SHI’s systems and operations,” the company said. “These preventative measures included taking some systems, including SHI’s public websites and email, offline while the attack was investigated and the integrity of those systems was assessed.””

On Wednesday, company email services were finally restored.

As of this morning (July 6th), SHI staff now have access to email again and the IT teams at SHI continue to work on bringing other systems back to full availability in a secure and reliable manner.

“Customers have full access to their account teams and specialists via both email and phone,” the company said.

“While the investigation into the incident is ongoing – and SHI is liaising with federal bodies including the FBI and CISA – there is no evidence to suggest that customer data was exfiltrated during the attack. No third-party systems in the SHI supply chain were affected,” the company reported.

SHI says the company is continuing to restore services to customers affected. SHI maintains offices in Somerset, New York City and Philadelphia. It is one of America’s largest IT and data security vendors in North America.

Phil Stilton
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