MINEOLA, N.Y.-- September 20, 2023 -- RevBits, a cyber security solution company based on Long Island, New York, completed a review of the 2022 Suffolk County, New York, cyber hack that rendered government systems largely inoperable for months, affecting municipal work and citizen interaction with their county government. The RevBits white paper, Suffolk Hack Part of a Chinese Plot?, was recently profiled in a companion piece in the September edition of The Long Island Press.

One year ago, on September 8, 2022, an anonymous email appeared on the Suffolk County government computer system announcing a devastating hack: unnamed thieves had sized four terabytes of data - some 300 million pages of detailed government information, including highly confidential personal information regarding 26,000 current and former employees as well as banking and personal information related to more than 400,000 people who have received traffic and parking tickets over the past years.

The hack brought government systems to a halt: crippling the billion-dollar real estate industry, sideswiping tens of millions of dollars in vital payments to mom-and-pop suppliers and disabled key functions of the county's 911 emergency system.

The RevBits white paper reveals that top US law enforcement and intelligence officials are convinced the intrusion was executed by Chinese government hacking teams as part of Beijing's drive toward global supremacy by 2049.

The white paper, initiated by RevBits CEO David Schiffer, who founded and headed Safe Banking Systems prior to running RevBits, is a veteran of the cyber-world, having intersected with many of the biggest computer cases of the past decades from Kremlin money laundering to security lapses at the FAA. “This hack hits close to home for us - we are a Long Island-based company, and I have been a Long Island resident nearly my whole life,” said Schiffer. “The scourge of state-sponsored hacking needs to be taken seriously by companies but, even more importantly, by governments, as they are responsible for delivering critical services and programs to citizens. Unfortunately, as our white paper points out, the Suffolk County government came up very short in handling this attack.”