Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett said they town's Information Technology (IT) systems were compromised this morning.
The mayor said officials worked to quickly shut down the system to protect against further compromise.
The incident happened early Thursday morning, according to the mayor.
“First thing in the morning, the fire department works 24 hours a day. So they realized we had been hacked at about five in the morning and we started shutting down everything immediately," Garrett told NBC Connecticut. “We are not able to process payments. So there were a lot of departments like the tax office wasn’t able to do much today."
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Emergency services were not interrupted during the compromise and non-emergency services will be available as soon as possible, according to Garrett.
“These events are increasing and they're probably get worse before they get better," said Quinnipiac University Cybersecurity Professor Frederick Scholl.
The Quinnipiac professor said a big cause of breaches is people making mistakes, so he suggests folks should be careful when receiving a text or email.
"Hackers can also take over accounts of your friends, colleagues, coworkers and they can use those accounts to send you realistic looking emails except they've embedded fake you know link instead of click on this to see this cool cat video. Click on this to download some malware," Scholl said.
The mayor said after a hack several years ago where up to weeks-worth of data was lost, the system was upgraded to fix weaknesses. Now, data is backed up more regularly.
“We are looking good for tomorrow. We are very fortunate we are not going to be impacted really more than a day," Garrett said.
She said the town will review the computer systems to find any other potential weak spots and make sure those are fixed.
