South Carolina Governor Haley announced Wednesday she handed down an Executive Order requiring extra forms of cyber security be implemented in all of her cabinet agencies.
The order requires all of the cabinet agencies to use 24-7 monitoring by South Carolina Division of State Information Technology, or DSIT and a computer monitoring system Haley called "the hand". The state plans to hire 4 full time employees to cover the DSIT monitoring. The hand system monitors real time files, and the second it sees anything questionable, Haley says, shuts down the computer.
The order will cover SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division), DEW (South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce), DPS (South Carolina Department of Public Safety), HHS (Health and Human Services) and DOT (Department of Transportation). Haley says they have reached out to other state agencies encouraging them to use the same protection. Haley says she hopes all of the agencies will have the new cyber protections in place within 60 days. The hand will cost $160,000 and will be paid by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security. The cost for the extra employees will be split among the agencies, Haley said.
Many details about the security breach are still unclear, Haley said. She said she and other government officials are working to investigate the details, and hoped to get an initial report to the public by Friday or Monday.
"This was a massive file that was taken," Haley said. "I'm not going to push them to come out with a report that's not complete."
Jimmy Earley, Director of the Division of State Information Technology, was with Haley at the news conference Wednesday afternoon. He said the move recently of the state Department of Revenue to a new location was one reason for lower level of computer security.
"We didn't do a full insight into their entire network before the breech," Earley told reporters.
State officials say roughly four million personal income tax returns and up to 657,000 business filings were compromised by the breach. Investigators have also isolated 5,000 credit cards that had been hacked, but all of them were on older, expired cards. There were a total of 16,000 credit cards that could have been exposed, officials said.
The government is working with credit company, Experian to try and protect families whose information was exposed. To date, Experian had received 775,495 calls and 789,554 activations for individual monitoring services.
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