Passaic County, New Jersey, said a malware attack disrupted county IT systems Wednesday and left government phone lines down into Thursday, as officials worked with state and federal partners to investigate and contain it.
The county posted a service alert saying all Passaic County phone lines were “currently down” and it would share an update once service is restored. No alternate phone numbers or workaround instructions were included in the alert.
In a separate statement dated Wednesday afternoon, Passaic County said it was “aware of a malware attack affecting our IT systems and impacting our phone lines,” adding that it understood “several other local governments in New Jersey have experienced similar incidents.” The county did not identify those governments or describe the malware.
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News 12 reported the county’s phones stopped working Wednesday and that federal, state and county officials were investigating while teams worked to resolve the issue.
ABC7 reported the county provided no further details beyond acknowledging the malware attack and the phone disruptions.
The county has not said whether any resident data was accessed, whether systems were encrypted, or whether public safety operations such as 911 or dispatch were affected.
County-level cyber incidents have increasingly produced the same real-world disruption Passaic County is now reporting: communications outages and degraded back-office services, even when 911 stays up. Winona County, Minnesota, disclosed a ransomware incident in January and said emergency services remained operational while teams tested and analyzed affected systems, later reporting progress restoring services. Mitchell County, North Carolina, tied an October ransomware attack to days of phone and email outages and later said attackers accessed and took protected health information tied to its Department of Social Services. In New Hampshire, Hillsborough County described a weekend network outage as a “cybersecurity incident,” saying it took systems offline as a precaution while public safety services remained online, underscoring how counties often isolate networks to contain damage while trying to keep essential operations running.
Passaic County, part of North Jersey’s New York metro region, is home to about 526,600 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates. County government offices are based in Paterson.
