While Murray County officials say progress continues toward restoring computer systems following last month’s ransomware attack, the cyber incident is also impacting some of Chatsworth and Eton’s operations, particularly within the police departments.
County leaders said last week there was little new information to report publicly, though recovery efforts remain ongoing.
“We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Murray County Sole Commissioner Noah Bishop said.
The ransomware attack, first reported shortly after 3 a.m. May 13, forced county officials to disconnect servers and operate many departments manually while cybersecurity experts work to restore systems. The FBI is investigating the incident.
Because some public safety systems are shared between the county and city, the outage has also disrupted operations at the Chatsworth Police Department.
“On our end, the biggest effect for our department is our reporting software,” Chatsworth Police Chief Josh Etheridge told the Times.
According to Etheridge, the department’s incident reports, accident reports and computer-aided dispatch systems all rely on servers shared with the county.
“Public safety operates on the same server system (as the county),” Etheridge said. “So whenever that went down, that had a direct impact on us.”
Etheridge said the department has been without its reporting software for more than two weeks, but added that regular policing operations continue.
“That is the extent with us, (also),” Eton Police Chief Todd Pasley told the Times. “We have kind of gone back to the 80s before we had all this stuff.”
“We can’t access our reporting system, so we are back to old school reports,” Pasley added.
The outage has forced officers at both departments to revert to older methods of documentation.
“Fortunately, we still had some of our old handwritten forms,” Etheridge said.
Officers are currently using handwritten reports, Excel spreadsheets and fillable PDF forms as temporary workarounds until the system is restored.
“It’s been a change,” Etheridge said. “The officers are doing a fantastic job adapting to it.”
In Chatsworth, the outage initially also affected video evidence servers used for body camera and dash camera footage, though Etheridge said no footage was lost.
“We checked. We haven’t lost anything,” he said. “We’re very fortunate for that.”
Etheridge said part of his department had already transitioned to cloud-based storage, which helped minimize the damage. Video systems have since been restored.
At present, the city police departments’ primary issue remains its records management and dispatch software, according to Etheridge.
Etheridge said the outage has not affected public safety services, though it has delayed the department’s ability to provide reports to the public.
“The only thing is we’re not able to provide those reports to the public,” he said.
To help residents involved in traffic accidents, the Georgia State Patrol has assisted with accident investigations when troopers are available so drivers can still obtain reports for insurance purposes.
Etheridge said officers are also exercising discretion regarding expired vehicle tags while county systems remain limited.
“It’s hard even to access the tags at times,” Etheridge said, noting officers can still verify registrations through the Georgia Department of Revenue website, though the process is slower.
“As far as the public goes, they don’t have anything to be concerned about,” he said, adding, “If the tag is expired for six months, I don’t think we’ll be quite as lenient.”
The chief said one of the biggest challenges has been losing instant access to records and statistical data normally available through the department’s records management systems.
“We’ve learned how dependent we are on technology now,” Etheridge said.
Etheridge said the city has already upgraded antivirus protections following recommendations from IT personnel and may consider expanding cloud-based systems in the future.
“We greatly appreciate the job that IT has done. They have put in a ton of hours,” Etheridge said.
County officials previously said payroll, tax operations and other government functions were also affected by the ransomware attack, though some limited services have since been restored using clean computers isolated from the county network.
Officials have not publicly disclosed whether any sensitive data was stolen during any demands made by the attackers.
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