Cellphone and know-how outages that plagued Albemarle County final month had been attributable to a ransomware assault, officers mentioned in a press release on Friday.
The county warned residents that it “seems possible” the hackers accessed the information of native authorities and public faculty staff — together with their driver’s license numbers, Social Safety numbers, passport numbers, army IDs and extra.
A number of the 112,000 residents of the county, residence to town of Charlottesville, additionally might have had their names, addresses and Social Safety numbers uncovered. The county mentioned it’s nonetheless conducting its investigation into the ransomware assault, which was initially discovered on the morning of June 11.
In a autopsy on the assault, the county defined that officers found points with their IT programs and realized they had been the victims of a ransomware incident.
Cybersecurity incident responders consider the assault started on the afternoon of June 10 and was slowly carried out in a single day — when the hackers possible “inappropriately accessed” programs with the private data of residents.
The county believes the hackers failed to realize entry to cloud-based programs and had been solely capable of breach information held on native servers.
The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company (CISA) and Cyber Fusion Middle of the Virginia State Police had been all notified of the assault.
Prematurely of determining precisely how many individuals had been affected by the information breach, the county is providing all residents, native authorities staff and public faculty employees one yr of free id safety companies.
Cellphone service was restored at county amenities after two weeks of outages. County buildings stayed open through the outages however non-emergency telephone strains had been impacted by the ransomware assault.
The Albemarle County Police Division did battle with entry to telephone service, and the county requested folks to electronic mail sure workplaces for help.
No cybercriminal gang took credit score for the ransomware assault as of Friday. About two hours away, Gloucester County warned employees last week that it additionally suffered a ransomware assault in April that uncovered Social Safety numbers and different delicate information.
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