Columbus city offices experience data breach attack, county and BCSC say they did not have data breaches

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Staff Reports
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11:04 a.m. UPDATE

Columbus city officials acknowledged this morning that in the evening hours of Wednesday, the city experienced a data breach.

Safeguards through the City of Columbus IT department immediately took place to limit access to information, city officials said.

The incident is being investigated by the City of Columbus Director of Security and Risk, Mike Richardson, along with City of Columbus IT Department.

According to Richardson, “We are working to investigate this isolated incident and taking measures to put further safeguards in place to mitigate future risk to the city’s cyber infrastructure.” No credit card or banking information within the city was compromised in the breach, city officials said.

The data breach is a completely separate and coincidental incident from the internet outage that occurred early this morning. Payments and online services will not be available at this time. City email is affected by the outage. Any previously scheduled meetings for the City of Columbus will continue to meet as scheduled.

Updates will be provided when connection is restored, city officials said.

 

10 A.M. UPDATE

Columbus city officials are regrouping after an attempted data breach to its computer system Wednesday night and the city losing internet service today.

Social media reports that Bartholomew County and BCSC are also under cyberattack are false, according to county and school officials. Some services that are connected to the city’s computer system, such as the county GIS system, have been affected but are being brought back online, according to county officials.

Columbus police said the city’s IT department stopped the breach attack Wednesday night, but the internet outage was a hardware issue that surfaced today and the city IT workers are currently working to restore service.

While CPD’s internet is down, all dispatch operations and police calls are continuing to function normally. The only disruption at this time is that the police department uses the internet to complete its reports, and those are being delayed until the internet is restored.

CPD officials said they hope to have the internet operational later today.

Bartholomew County government suffered little, if any, damage to their information technology system during the incident and county workers still have access to the internet, Bartholomew County Commissioners chairman Larry Kleinhenz said.
The commissioner says it was 7 p.m. Wednesday when he was made aware of a computer system breach that impacted the internet of a local governmental entity. He said he could not be more specific, saying he prefer that entity to release details.
But Bartholomew County Information Technology director Scott Mayes was up all-night checking the county’s IT system to see if it was breached, Kleinhenz said.
The only impact is the Geographic Information System shared by both city and county governments.
Precautionary steps were taken to prevent damage to the county’s internet system, and further checks are being made, Kleinhenz said.
BCSC officials said their systems are operating normally today.

 

ORIGINAL STORY

COLUMBUS, Ind. — City of Columbus offices are experiencing an internet outage.

Payments and other online services are not available at this time. City email is also affected.

Updates will be provided when connection is restored.

This story will be updated.

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