By Jennifer Smola, The Columbus Dispatch
NEWARK — The typical county business of bid openings and appropriating funds has been overshadowed by talk of Bitcoins and terabytes over the past six days in Licking County.
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County offices are slowly beginning to get back to normal after a ransomware virus resulted in a countywide network shutdown last week. The ransomware encrypts files and holds information hostage until a ransom is paid to unlock the system. The virus was detected on a Licking County computer Tuesday night, and IT staff members quickly shut down the county’s network to prevent it from spreading.
Rather than pay the ransom, the county has been working to rebuild its system, a move officials say was possible because of good backups and the quick system shutoff Tuesday night.
Most county data was backed up through the day before the cyberattack, said Darrin Baldinelli, the county’s information technologies director.
The county’s phone system was restored over the weekend, as IT staff began reformatting roughly 1,000 county computers. Some servers were being restored Monday, and technicians will continue to restore data in order of highest priority, for example, the servers that house felony-case tracking for the prosecutor’s office and the auditor’s property records database.
Officials would not disclose the amount of the ransom demand. It’s unclear how much the attack and its aftermath will cost the county, but it likely will cost more in the long run than to pay the ransom, County Commissioner Tim Bubb said Monday.
“We have lost a large part of our focus on serving the people of Licking County,” Bubb said. “What price do you put on that?”
There was no guarantee that paying the ransom would have restored everything, Bubb said, and by avoiding the ransom payment, technicians can keep evidence to determine how the virus got in and how to protect against it in the future, he said.
Moving forward, the county will be tightening its firewall and network connections, and will be strict about employees regularly changing passwords, Bubb said.