Albemarle latest Virginia county hit with ransomware

Phone and technology outages that plagued Albemarle County last month were caused by a ransomware attack, officials said in a statement on Friday. 

The county warned residents that it “appears likely” the hackers accessed the data of local government and public school employees — including their driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, military IDs and more.

Some of the 112,000 residents of the county, home to the city of Charlottesville, also may have had their names, addresses and Social Security numbers exposed. The county said it is still conducting its investigation into the ransomware attack, which was initially discovered on the morning of June 11. 

In a post-mortem on the attack, the county explained that officials discovered issues with their IT systems and realized they were the victims of a ransomware incident. 

Cybersecurity incident responders believe the attack began on the afternoon of June 10 and was slowly conducted overnight — when the hackers likely “inappropriately accessed” systems with the personal information of residents. 

The county believes the hackers failed to gain access to cloud-based systems and were only able to breach data held on local servers. 

The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Cyber Fusion Center of the Virginia State Police were all notified of the attack. 

In advance of figuring out exactly how many people were affected by the data breach, the county is offering all residents, local government employees and public school workers one year of free identity protection services. 

Phone service was restored at county facilities after two weeks of outages. County buildings stayed open during the outages but non-emergency phone lines were impacted by the ransomware attack. 

The Albemarle County Police Department did struggle with access to phone service, and the county asked people to email certain offices for assistance. 

No cybercriminal gang took credit for the ransomware attack as of Friday. About two hours away, Gloucester County warned employees last week that it also suffered a ransomware attack in April that exposed Social Security numbers and other sensitive data.