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Last May, Illinois was among the governments and private
companies worldwide that were exposed when cyber criminals
exploited a vulnerability in a widely used third party transfer
system called MOVEit.
During an audit by the Legislative Inspector General, Acting
Secretary Sanjay Gupta said fending off cyber attacks is a daily
battle.
“The landscape continues to evolve very quickly, so in some ways
we already have attacks happening to the state infrastructure
everyday, as we speak there are probably some going on right
now, so our team is continuously working to see how we can
continue to be catching up with the bad actors,” Gupta said.
Gupta said his agency moved quickly to the May cyber attack
affecting the state’s network, evicting the attacker within
three hours and “verifying that the vulnerability could no
longer be exploited in our system.”
In the summer of 2016, the Illinois State Board of Elections was
hacked. The names, addresses and other personal information from
about 500,000 Illinois voters was stolen through a hacking
technique called “SQL injection.” The technique is a common form
of cyber-trickery used to illegally gain access to government,
financial, business and private computers. After a federal
investigation, 12 Russian operatives were indicted for hacking
Illinois’ voter database.
Adam Ford, chief information security officer with the
Department of Innovation & Technology, said fending off cyber
attacks is an ever-evolving process.
“Attackers do adapt and change to new things, novel approaches
happen everyday, and so our team is diligently working to ensure
monitoring for successful attacks and remediate them as rapidly
as possible,” Ford said.
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