Orange County in North Carolina has made an official statement on Monday that its servers were under the siege of ransomware causing downtime to digital services at the key public offices such as county libraries, sheriff’s office, and Registration off deeds.
Highly placed sources say that the malware attack took place at around 6 am on Monday impacting the entire computer network which had to be later closed down for precaution.
News is out that almost all real estate dealings or issue of marriage registration licenses has been shut down on a temporary note and all vouchers processing at the county’s housing department and the tax office have been halted.
Furthermore, the County’s Planning Department has also halted the process of fees and permits related to library services until next Monday.
Jim Northrup, the CIO of Orange County’s IT department has confirmed the news and admitted that the data was encrypted by the hackers who were demanding hundreds of dollars in cryptocurrency.
County authorities are still busy finding ways to deal with the situation and are planning to use the available backups to restore the data continuity.
Northrup is sure that no data was compromised in the incident and suspects that the attack could have been launched by hackers from the United States and ruled out the possibility of the indulgence of state-funded actors in this cyber incident.
Note- Orange County has been a victim of ransomware on a previous note as its digital systems have been paralyzed 2 or 3 times on a similar note in the past six years.
Mark Chilton, the Registrar of deeds for the county believed that the network will likely be non-operational for almost two weeks.
