The Cumberland County Register of Deeds' electronic records were temporarily down Thursday after one of the servers was infected with ransomware this week, said clerk J. Lee Warren Jr.
The ransomware was discovered Wednesday afternoon on a server hosted in Greensboro, Warren said. Only one server was affected and no data was lost or compromised, he said.
“We have taken that server down and are rebuilding our website,” Warren said. “The images are on a separate server and were not affected.”
The attack also took down the Hoke County Register of Deeds website, Hoke County Registrar of Deeds Elaine Brayboy reported Thursday.
"Our documents were not compromised in any way," he said.
Warren said his office is working with the North Carolina Local Government Information Technology Association's IT Attack Team and the North Carolina National Guard, members of the four-party North Carolina Joint Cybersecurity Task Force.
According to NCDIT spokeswoman Nicole Meister, the North Carolina Department of Information Technology and the North Carolina Department of Emergency Management are also part of the task force.
“Along with other local, state and federal agencies, the (task force) provides technical guidance and support to government and educational agencies facing cyber threats,” Meister said Thursday.
Warren said the task force is investigating who is behind the attack and how the ransomware infected the server.
Who is affected?
Warren said his office sent a notice to the Longleaf Pine Realtors , a real estate association whose 2,400 members use their website daily.
Melissa McKinney, president of Longleaf Pine Realtors, said Thursday that the attack caused disruption for realtors but will not harm the business.
According to Warren, people can still visit the Land Registry office to physically search for records or use the computers .
He did not have an estimate for when electronic registrations would be accessible.
Source of information: eu.fayobserver.com
