MONROE — Green County government data service appears to have been largely recovered from a nearly month’s long internet and network disruption that impacted phone lines and communications almost county-wide for several weeks.
County officials will not, however, say why those networks went down in the first place.
“It’s under investigation,” said Green County Board Chair Jerry Guth, on Monday, Feb. 24. Restoration to most systems were back online by that afternoon.
In fact, all systems and phone services had been restored by Monday, except land records. The restored services reportedly, finally include the phone and internet lines, officials said.
What they “continue to investigate” — a network interruption — could be anything, including a hack, ransomware or something less nefarious. But the county is steadfastly keeping mum.
During a recent IT meeting in which the item was set to be brought up in closed session, it was referred to opaquely as an impactful incident and included input from the county’s attorney.
Still the outage hit systems in various departments throughout the county. In early February a disruption first caused county government phones and internet to go down. Then, for more than a week, county workers have had to scramble and improvise while many of the systems were offline.
The situation continued into last week.
“Upon learning of the incident, Green County took certain systems offline out of an abundance of caution and began a thorough investigation with leading information security professionals,” said Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli Feb. 13, in a brief statement updating the investigation. “Our investigation is still ongoing, but at this time we cannot say for certain what information or data — if any — has been impacted as a result.”
“Our primary focus remains on a safe and efficient remediation process in the restoration of our systems,” she added.
The Green County Sheriff’s Office, which uses a separate government communications network, was not impacted by the disruption.