Sam Gurwitt Photo
Maria Coppola using a typewriter in the Hamden Town Clerk’s office.
It’s a good thing that workers in the Hamden Town Clerk’s office still keep typewriters on their desks: Otherwise, it would have made it a lot more difficult to get married in the last week in Hamden.
This past Friday, Town Hall employees received an email that contained a computer virus. Employees were instructed to delete the email immediately. But some opened a link in it, infecting town computers with malware.
Since then, the entire town hall computer system has been inaccessible, though at least one department was back up and running on Thursday.
Town Clerk Vera Morrison said that when she opened her email after the long weekend, she had 15 or so of the phishing emails. One appeared to be in Italian. Luckily, her office still keeps typewriters on its desks, and on Thursday afternoon, the Town Clerk’s Office was filled with the “chick-chick-chick” of IBM electric typewriters.
“It’s a pretty nasty virus,” Morrison told the Independent.
Town Clerk’s office employee Maria Coppola said she has had to type up absentee ballot envelopes one by one. Marriage licenses, too, she’s been typing with the typewriters. It’s either that, she said, or someone with very neat handwriting.
Though the virus only infected a few computers directly, the IT Department directed all employees to shut down their computers in order to keep the problem from spreading. That means that employees don’t have access to any digital town resources, including their emails.
The town has hired a consultant to help it recover from the virus. With the consultant’s help, IT workers were able to get the tax collector’s system back up and running, and were still working on other departments one by one.
“Our internal IT team and third party experts are responding to this event actively and making significant progress,” Mayor Curt Leng wrote in a statement. “We appreciate the patience and understanding of the community while we focus on addressing all issues caused by this event as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. We expect to have a more comprehensive update to offer by tomorrow.”