WCSO nearly recovered from cyber attack

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office is nearly done recovering from last week’s ransomware cyber attack.

 WCSO Information Technology (IT) staff and a private IT company worked to get the finance and jail systems back online. 

The WCSO app has been offline since the day of the attack, Feb. 21. According to Crews, IT was in the process of connecting the app back to the server. The app came back online on March 1.

 The origin of the attack has not been released but Crews says he believes they know the origin of the attack. 

“We believe the attack originated in Russia,†Crews said. “We aren’t absolutely sure but we believe it to be.â€

Calls for service and communication with officers were not affected. “We are grateful our communication lines never went down,†Crews said. “We never lost our phone lines and were able to continue to serve our community in that arena.â€