While the U.S. government is beginning to uncover and react to an expansive cybersecurity breach into branches and departments, one local government is close to recovery from a similar attack.

Chatham County is nearing the point where it was before October 28, when a cyber incident disrupted the government’s phone lines, email networks and other services. While 911 services and the process of early voting went unaffected, government workers were left with little ways to easily communicate.

County Commissioner Karen Howard recently spoke about this with 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck and said while things are nearly back to normal, an investigation is still ongoing as to the cause and way the attack was conducted.

“We don’t really know what happened,” she said. “I do know that in the days and weeks leading up to the incident, we had multiple attempts to infiltrate our system. We had a very high level of security, our package was a strong package. But if someone’s intent is simply to sit there and, with extremely sophisticated technology, find a way in a crack, invariably they will find a crack.”

To bypass the limitations caused by the outage, the Chatham County government employees found creative methods to continue services. Many staff members have relied on mobile hot spots to complete work from offices with internet networks were disabled and the county shared updates with its residents through directly posting on its website. The county also created temporary emails and phone lines for employees after some employees relied on personal ones.

Since then, the county government has created a web page dedicated to the incident sharing the new contact information for government departments and detailing what little is publicly known about the October 28 incident. The page says it has partnered with law enforcement from the beginning to investigate the cause of the outage and is working wit support agencies to recover.

Howard said the recent breach of security at the federal government level is an indication of how technology is “a vulnerability” for many institutions. She said Chatham County is implementing more security protocols to prepares for any sort of similar incident in the future.

“It can still happen,” she said, “but I think we are comfortable with how we’ll be able to respond faster next time and some of the things we’re putting in place to ensure if we do have a cyberattack, it won’t affect every system the way it did. We just have to keep going forward.”

Chatham County’s web page on its cyber incident can be found here.

Photo via the Chatham County Government.

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