The city of Columbus experienced a data breach on Wednesday night followed by an internet outage as officials continue to look further into how and why the breach occurred, who was responsible and work to get the city’s computer systems back online.
“At this point in time, we are not 100% sure on how they got in the system, but that’s what we’re working on,” the city’s director of security and risk, Mike Richardson, told The Republic.
When the breach occurred around 7 p.m. Wednesday night, the city’s IT department took immediate steps to safeguard and limit access to information, according to city officials.
“The intention first was to get it to stop, our IT became aware of it and as soon as they did they shut the whole system down,” Richardson said.
The extent of the breach is still under investigation, according to Richardson. The city said in a press release sent out earlier Thursday that no credit card or banking information was compromised.
It’s being investigated by Richardson, along with the City of Columbus IT Department — the FBI is not currently involved, nor is any other outside law enforcement agency, although Richardson said Columbus Police Chief Steve Norman has been a part of city meetings throughout the day Thursday on the issue.
City officials said in a press release that the breach and the outage were “completely separate and coincidental.”
“From what I’ve been told from our IT department, those are two totally separate instances, just when it rains it pours,” Richardson said.
The city’s IT team had been working all night Wednesday and all day Thursday trying to figure out how whoever was responsible was able to carry out the breach and get computer systems back up and running again.
City payments and online services are not available due to the outage, along with city email. Previously scheduled meetings at city hall went on as scheduled Thursday.
Richardson said the city did not experience a ransomware attack where information was accessed by an outside entity and held hostage for payment.
“No, we’ve not had any of that, nobody’s reached out and tried to hold something for ransom,” Richardson said.
Social media reports that Bartholomew County and BCSC also experienced a data breach 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, had been affected, according to county officials. Bartholomew County government suffered little, if any, damage to their IT system during the incident and county workers still have access to the internet, Bartholomew County Commissioners chairman Larry Kleinhenz said.
While CPD’s internet is down, all dispatch operations and police calls continued to function normally. The only disruption was in completing reports, which used the internet. Those are being delayed until online access is restored, CPD said.
