(Seguin) — Guadalupe County officials are responding to a cyber-attack that has impacted the county’s overall operations network. County Judge Kyle Kutscher says the incident started over the weekend.
What we have experienced at the county starting on Saturday early morning June 11 was a data security incident. It’s not considered a breach at this point because there is no information out there that makes us believe any personal information has been obtained by the outside parties. Our IT director was called early Saturday morning just with basically concerns of disruption with our email and some of our systems at the county,” said Kutscher.
Kutscher says their information technology (IT) staff prepares for these kinds of challenges as best they can, and they immediately began their response once they were notified.
“We have a process in place because we have backup servers, everything encrypted. A lot of systems are very very safe but there are protocols in place if we do have any disruption like this to enlist or get the services of third party investigators to look at these items and through those efforts, those third party investigators, forensic auditors basically that deal with cyber security let us know that there was an incident that occurred that controlled some of our emails, locked some of our computers, did not obtain any information but again still had an impact in ultimately disrupting operations in the county,” said Kutscher.
It’s not clear who is responsible for the attack, but Kutscher says once they were notified about the incident, they worked to begin to neutralize the incident. They then called for outside cyber security to help assess the situation.
“Once we were notified of a possible disruption or problem from an outside source, we locked everything down, cut off all of the servers and everything to the outside world and used basically our IT resources within the county and the higher group of the third party to go ahead and start sweeping our servers, all of our systems. We have certain things that in house and certain systems that sit on the cloud environment – really just going through making sure that all of that was safe and started rebuilding some of those things in a safe environment to scan for any threats to them basically turn back on for county access but during this initial assessment phase it was just shut everything down, find out what is safe and then slowly start turning things on to utilize them for county services,” said Kutscher.
Judge Kutscher says at this time it does not appear that there was a data breach, and no personal information appears to have been lost. He says if that changed, the public will be immediately notified.
“At this point, we have no information that indicates any personal information has been released to any outside party or any outside agency other than the county. We do have an obligation and responsibility if we do find that out in the future at anytime. We will notify the media, the public as soon as we knew that and let the individuals who might been affected know that. So, at this point, I hope everybody knows that we are committed to being as safe as possible. We understand that we have a lot of individuals’ information. We are trying to be as careful as possible but if we do find out that something has been released, we will definitely let everyone know that,” said Kutscher.
The attack has impacted the county’s ability to provide some services. Kutscher says they are getting regular updates from the outside cyber security firm as they work with the county’s IT staff to safely rebuild the local network.
“This incident has definitely impacted county operations because in this day and age, just like many entities, we are tied to internet, to servers, to a number of different functions that require computers and systems so when we found out it was an issue and shut everything down, it has definitely impacted every single operation that the county has in some form or fashion. It’s going to take us some time to get back to full operation to make sure that we are completely safe but we are finding ways to be able to still provide central services to the public but again, yes, we have been definitely impacted and I hope everybody can be patient and we appreciate that patience as we work through these challenges,” said Kutscher.
Kutscher says a special email address has been set up for people who need to contact the county, or who might have questions about the cyber incident that is currently being investigated. The email address is guadcoinfo@gmail.com.