Hackers launched Cyber Attacks on the government website of Fayette County locking down staff from accessing email accounts. Michael King, the County’s IT Director reported that the email systems of the county witnessed a break-in last week perhaps to gain access in order to send spam email or to perpetuate malware such as ransomware.
“I just don’t know why we are being targeted. But some hacker/s group has targeted our email systems with brute force attacks”, King said. The IT director has added that the ticket numbers are growing day by day as more of the staff is getting locked out of their accounts.
Technically, when a user logs in with a wrong password more than 5 times, he/she gets locked from access for almost an hour. The IT department can only resolve this issue by unlocking it manually.
Here in this instance, some cyber crook is launching the attack in such a way that each and every email account is getting locked due to wrong password input.
Jane Downard, the county auditor experienced this on the last weekend and reported the issue as serious to the IT department.
King then ordered an inquiry in which it was found that cyber attacks on the email systems of the county were taking place from August this year. It was also discovered in the inquiry that more than 2,100 bad login attempts were made on a single day from IP addresses coming from China, Russia, Bulgaria, and Rumania.
Though the brute force attack stopped from mid-August, it re-emerged by the end of last month.
The IT staff of Fayette County is now in a look out for an automated backup solution which could be triggered by a disaster as a data continuity plan. The county is searching for a solution with a budget limit of $10k to $12k per annum.
King and his staff are currently practicing a manual backup of the system and storing it in an offsite vault.
