Government Servers in Orange County Encrypted by Ransomware

Who: Orange County Government

# of Accounts Breached: Undetermined

What was affected: Servers and Network Orange County

When it happened: March 2019

How it happened: Orange County located in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area of California 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 the office of Register of Deeds​. 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. 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.

Outcome: 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. The county believed that the network will likely be non-operational for almost two weeks.