Nothing and no one will stop the Miami-Dade County Tax Collector’s Office from continuing our fight against fraud and protecting the residents of this community. Anyone who commits fraud, abuses a government program, falsifies information, or attempts to take advantage of our residents will be investigated and, when criminal conduct is identified, referred to law enforcement to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
Our message to anyone who believes they can sabotage, attack, disrupt, or compromise our technology in an attempt to interfere with that mission is just as clear: you will not stop us.
“We have worked too hard to build systems that protect our residents and identify fraud, and nobody is going to sabotage that work,” said Miami-Dade County Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez. “If you commit fraud, we are coming after the fraud. If you attempt to attack or sabotage our systems, we will investigate that too. We will find the facts, work to identify those responsible, and pursue every lawful avenue to hold them accountable. We will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not stop putting people first.”
The Office will not speculate about the identity or motivation of those responsible while the investigation remains active. But Fernandez made clear that whether the threat comes from a criminal actor, an individual seeking to cause disruption, or any domestic or foreign adversary, the Office is prepared to protect its systems and continue its mission.
This morning, the Miami-Dade County Tax Collector’s Office identified suspicious cyber activity involving a limited Content Management System, or CMS, used to receive and respond to questions submitted by the public through the Tax Collector’s website.
Upon discovering the activity, the affected virtual environment was immediately quarantined and isolated by the Office’s information technology team. The incident remains under active investigation as the Office works to determine its nature, scope, origin, and those responsible.
The Office’s core services remain fully operational and were not affected. The Miami-Dade County network was not affected. The Tax Collector’s internal network was not affected. No physical computer, workstation, server, or other device connected to those networks was affected.
The CMS involved is a virtual service hosted in a separate cloud-based environment operating on an isolated network. It is intentionally separated from the Miami-Dade County network, the Tax Collector’s internal network, and the physical infrastructure supporting the Office’s core operations.
The affected environment does not have direct access to those internal networks and is separate from systems used for state driver licenses and identification cards, state databases, taxpayer financial systems, and other core transactional services.
Based on the information available at this time, there is no indication that the Miami-Dade County network, the Tax Collector’s internal network, or physical devices connected to those networks were compromised. There is also no indication at this time that confidential resident information contained within those systems was accessed through this incident.
“Our residents need to know that we are open, operational, and continuing to serve them,” Fernandez said. “We are answering phones, processing transactions, serving customers in our offices, and continuing the work we do every day. The safeguards and separation we built into our technology helped contain this incident.”
Fernandez said the Office will continue its investigation and will not allow the incident to distract from its enforcement efforts.
“If someone’s objective is to interfere with our work against fraud, they have failed,” Fernandez said. “We are going to continue identifying fraud. We are going to continue protecting taxpayer resources. We are going to continue referring criminal activity to law enforcement. And anyone who attempts to sabotage the systems that help us do that should understand something very clearly: we are not going anywhere.”
The Miami-Dade County Tax Collector’s Office continues to monitor its systems, investigate the incident, and strengthen cybersecurity safeguards where appropriate. If the investigation identifies information requiring additional action or notification, the Office will respond accordingly and keep the public informed.
At this time, all core Tax Collector systems remain operational, the Miami-Dade County network remains unaffected, the Tax Collector’s internal and physical network infrastructure remains unaffected, and the Office continues serving Miami-Dade County residents as usual.
