On November 5, unusual activity was detected on Division of Retirement and Benefits (DRB) server and initial investigation revealed it to be a cybersecurity incident. The State Security Office immediately started an investigation and incident response was activated. Through the course of the investigation, compromised machines were quickly identified.

Based on significant forensic analysis, the security office was able to return DRB workstations to service and identify the affected servers. The investigation also revealed no indication of data loss or any larger impact beyond the DRB environment.

The Division’s main system was not affected by the outage. So, new retirees will still receive their pension payments as anticipated. Because workstations were initially isolated, approximately one week of processing was lost, which could result in some minor delays. However, the Division is still processing retirements and is confident they can process all November retirements that are complete and without issues within six weeks. The outage has not resulted in any pause or delay of pension payments to retirees. The outage has, however, affected open enrollment for member health benefits. We will ensure that disruptions to open enrollment are accommodated by deadline extensions that allow all members adequate time to manage their benefits.