Orange County employees are being asked to change passwords for online personal finance accounts, after the county’s computer servers were compromised last month by a malware virus.

Employees had already been told to change their internal work-related passwords used to access county servers, but an email from the county last week said employee personal passwords might have been compromised as well.

And while the county has not heard any reports of personal accounts being compromised following the detection of the virus in mid-March, employees who might have accessed their online accounts from county computers are being advised to change their passwords, “out of an abundance of caution.”

“If you used your computer at any point to, for example, log onto Facebook for example, they’re saying, you need to change that; You need to change everything,” chair of the Orange County Commissioners Penny Rich told WCHL’s Aaron Keck recently about the malware infection.

“We’re being overly, overly cautious and being mindful that there’s a lot of information on our servers, and we need to protect that.”

Rich said things are mostly back to usual for the county after its servers were shut down when the hack was detected March 18.

County officials said the incident is being investigated by federal law enforcement and cyber-security professionals. At this time, they believe no computers or systems at county facilities accessible by the public were compromised.

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