Major systems in Fulton County, Georgia have been offline since last week when a ‘cyber incident’ affected government systems. While the county has tried its best to continue operations as normal, phone lines, the court system, property records and more have been shut down. The county has not yet confirmed details of the cyber incident, such as which group may be behind it or the motivations for the attack. According to Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Rob Pitts, as of Tuesday it did not appear that a data breach had occurred.
Fulton County made headlines in August as the location where prosecutors chose to bring election interference charges against former President Donald Trump. But don’t worry, officials assured the public that the attack had no impact on the case. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said, “All material related to the election case is housed in a separate, highly secure system that has not been hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult, if not impossible.” Has been done.”
Despite this, the Fulton County election system did not become the target of the attack. While Fulton County’s Registration and Elections Department went down, Fulton County said in a statement, “There is no indication that this incident is related to the election process.” “Out of an abundance of caution, Fulton County and the (Georgia) Secretary of State’s respective technology systems were isolated from each other as part of the response efforts.”
So far, the impact of the attack has ranged widely from delays in obtaining marriage certificates to disruptions in court hearings. On Wednesday, a murder suspect was also out of custody due to miscommunication during the outage. The manhunt continues after officers accidentally released the suspect while he was being transferred between Clayton County and Fulton County for trial.
The county has not released information on when it expects the system to be fully restored, but is working with law enforcement on recovery efforts. Meanwhile, while constituents are having trouble accessing some government services, Fulton County has released a list of contact information for affected departments. Fulton County also released a full list of affected systems.
As the government IT outage occurred, a local student also hacked the Fulton County School System statscoop on Friday. The school system is still determining whether any personal information was breached, but most services were back online by Monday.
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