City Hall’s bumbling tech czar previously held a similar job in Atlanta — which was crippled by a cyberattack shortly after he left for the Big Apple.
Samir Saini, who’s enmeshed in a scandal over an entirely preventable crash of the city’s in-house wireless network, was Atlanta’s chief information officer when Mayor Bill de Blasio named him head of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in January 2018.
Less than two months after he started the job, Atlanta shut down all of its government computers for five days to prevent the spread of a virus that was detected on March 22, 2018.
The cost of recovering from that attack, blamed on a pair of Iranian hackers, was estimated at $17 million.
A city official told The Post on Thursday that the combination of incidents meant Saini “should be fired” from his $226,366-a-year post.
“What happened in Atlanta should have shown City Hall that he was punching above his weight. And then he went ahead and proved it,” the official said.
Emails obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News revealed that officials had discussed earlier cybersecurity incidents during 2017, including one in which a computer was infected with a ransomware virus.
Cybersecurity expert Tony UcedaVelez, CEO of Atlanta-based VerSprite, told the news organizations that the correspondence “tells me they didn’t do enough triaging of the security threat that was found a long, long, long time ago.”