'I have no answers': The reason funeral homes have to delay their ceremonies

Madison Goldberg is staring at the "can't be reached" screen while trying to fill out death certificates at Palms West Funeral Home's offices. The frustration comes after various cybersecurity blogs reported the Florida Department of Health was affected by a cyber-attack earlier this month.

The hack is delaying families from getting birth certificates and death certificates as reported previously by WPTV.

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The hack means it takes more time to fill out a death certificate for people like Goldberg filling out the document by hand rather than online. She also said the quality of the certificates has decreased, which means people's personal information like social security numbers are visible on a public record.

"It would look like a proper certificate, now it's like a copy, pasted kinda nonsense," Goldberg said. "The biggest problem to me is they [health department] have no answer for us. So when families ask me, I’m like I don't know. I have no answers for them."

WPTV Reporter Ethan Stein obtained a copy of the instructions the state sent to funeral directors.

The updated instructions don't list any deadline for a solution to the problem facing funeral directors across the state.

Florida law also forbids payments for ransomware attacks, meaning the data hackers obtained could have already been released online while the state continues to face problems with birth and death certificates.

Julian Almeida, Vice President of Palms West Funeral Homes, said the hack is creating chaos in the funeral industry. He said there is a consistent backlog of people that's growing because of chasing down medical examiners and doctors to sign the certificates in their emails rather than an online portal.

"What it used to take one person to do, now I'm having three people working on it for people to make sure the certificates get signed and taken care of," Almeida said. "The frustrating part is the part we can’t serve the families as fast as they want to and that's what creates the problems."

He also said his business is reporting deaths to the Social Security Administration directly because people aren't able to get money from the program while the systems are down.

"My concern is a big organization like the health department that does not have a back-up system when something like
this happens is ridiculous," Almeida said. "You're a government agency. You gotta have a back-up. We have back-ups in our funeral home for our computer. If something happens, we get all of our information back. They don't."

Stein interviewed Robert Bucchere, who lost his wife Camille 10 days ago. It took him over two weeks to get her certificate.

"It's just scary, it's just a nightmare," Bucchere said. "It sounds silly, but there are so many things you need to do. You can't take her name off a bank account because they don't have a death certificate, you can't do life insurance, you can't go to the DMV to surrender her driver's license because they need a death certificate. You can't call social security because you can't do anything with that because you need a death certificate."

Both Almedia and Goldberg said the problems are from a cyberattack, but, the department didn't use that language instead calling it a "temporary outage" in an email statement to WPTV.

Various cybersecurity blogs reported the Florida DOH was hit with a ransomware attack, which exfiltrated 100 gigabytes of files from the state agency and asked for an undisclosed sum earlier this month. The Tampa Bay Times reported RansomHub was involved with HIV diagnosis and patient data was leaked on Friday .

A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health said it had no update or timeline on a potential fix they are working on a solution as fast as possible.

“We are working around the clock to restore the online Vital Statistics system,” State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said in a written statement. “The majority of Department operations and services remain operational and unchanged.”

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