Newsday Taps Nizich for Cybersecurity Story

Michael Nizich, Ph.D., director of the ETIC and adjunct associate professor of computer science, lent his cybersecurity expertise to Newsday’s ongoing coverage of the Suffolk County ransomware attack. As the article notes, at the time of publishing, “a handful of services remain offline and Suffolk County’s capital budget will be filed two weeks late as impacts of a cyberattack on the county’s systems linger.” This includes remote applications, such as those used for county title searches. Nizich explains that these types of applications are more vulnerable to attack by an outside entity because they do not reside inside the county’s “trusted” computer base. For this reason, those systems must maintain the highest level of security because they allow outside access to county data. He said these services are typically in what is known as a demilitarized zone (DMZ), or a digital space where users can view and access county data while not being allowed to harm the network.

“Due to the complexity of these configurations, it’s imperative that care be taken to properly install, configure, and, most of all, test the DMZ and all services that lie inside of it to assure that they are secure from all human and non-human threat agents,” Nizich said.