A computer virus struck the Brookfield Police Department last week, sending parts of the operation back to the dark ages of, oh, 25 years ago.
“We’ve been reduced to typewriters and pens and pencils, like the old days,” Police Chief Dan Faustino said Monday, May 8. “Some people were more lost than others.”
Handwritten reports will have to be manually entered into the police reporting software program. Some officers wrote their reports in Microsoft Word; they just weren’t able to enter them into the database until system access returned.
“No one is safe from malicious computer attacks,” Faustino said. “Just about every four years, one gets through all the safeguards we have and last week decided to encrypt all of our files.”
The computer system went down either April 30 or May 1, and came back on line at 2:30 p.m. Monday, May 7.
“We actually do backups that are backed up twice a day or four times a day, depending on how they have it set,” Faustino said. “It keeps it to a minimum, anything we can lose. They’ve been in the process, because of the volume of data that’s on our servers, of rebuilding it.”
Department staff was going through the records and looking for anything they recognized to be missing.
“We’re getting by, and there’s no data that’s stolen or (that anyone is) able to do anything with,” the chief said. “Our backups are encrypted offsite, so no one can read them. We recover from them.”
