Washington County working to get services back up after cyberattack
WASHINGTON, Pa. (KDKA) -- Washington County continues to work to get services back up and running after a cyberattack last week.
The cyberattack shut down the county's main server, affecting many government and courthouse services.
County Commissioner Nick Sherman told KDKA-TV it shut down all operations on every county computer they have.
"In 2024, everything that we do is on the web. Everything that we do is in the cloud. Everything we do is on computers for the county government," Sherman said. "So, it brought us to a screeching halt. We have been since working to get everything back up and operating."
Sherman said officials had to go back to using pen and paper to record certain services while its IT department worked to install secondary servers and new firewalls.
He said despite the attack, court hearings have been able to continue and its 911 and public safety system was never compromised.
He said a big priority has been working to make sure employees get paid on time.
"Payroll was something that we digitized about four years ago. So, everyone that works in the county has direct deposit. No one is paid with paper checks. So that was just a process of getting that up and running," Sherman said. "We work with PNC, that's our bank under contract. They hand-delivered a large amount of checks and fortunately we never had to go to that. We installed secondary servers and we're up and running so we could get people paid on time."
Sherman said most offices are back up and running as usual but some within the district attorney's office are still offline.
"There's still some services in the district attorney's office. Again, they're up and running, but how they file the paperwork, so again, it's just to get the computers, get the servers, have email for everyone and then now it's going through the different software and reinstalling that," Sherman said.
He said it's been a frustrating process.
"When your life is all in the computer, you don't realize until you're continuously opening (your computer) and realizing it's not on. It's been an inconvenience," Sherman said.
The FBI and Homeland Security are investigating the attack. So far it's unclear who was behind it or if a ransom was paid.