Government offices in North Carolina, Georgia disrupted by cyberattacks

A city in North Carolina and a district attorney’s office covering four counties in Georgia are both dealing with operational issues related to recent cyberattacks. 

Thomasville, North Carolina, home to about 30,000 residents, said essential services will still be available but many city systems will be offline due to a cyberattack.

The city explained Thursday in a statement that an attack  targeted its municipal systems. It is currently “unclear whether any sensitive information has been accessed or compromised,” officials said.

The IT department is working with a cybersecurity firm to assess how widespread the attack is and how long the recovery will take. 

Thomasville is about 30 minutes south of Winston-Salem, which had its own city systems knocked offline by a cyberattack in January. 

City Manager Michael Brandt said Thomasville notified state and federal authorities about the attack. North Carolina is one of only a handful of states to have a law explicitly banning government entities from paying ransoms associated with ransomware attacks. 

Ogeechee outages

About three hours south in Georgia, the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office warned the counties it governs about phone and internet outages impacting its work.

The office published updates in local newspapers and on social media saying its operations are limited and several offices will be closed as it deals with a cyberattack that began on Tuesday morning.

Georgia’s judicial system is split into 10 regional districts where court administration is run locally. The Ogeechee district covers four counties that are home to about 180,000 people, the most populated being Effingham and Bulloch counties. 

Most of the district’s offices will be closed for the next five days as investigations are held and systems are recovered. Officials warned that residents should expect the restoration timeline to change and said staff members will have “limited ability to check emails as well as appear in court.”

Some courts will still be open and state law enforcement agencies have been notified of the incident. 

The statement notes that the office was previously told it needed to implement a backup system “specifically to guard against this type of event” but did not because of cost concerns. 

“It wasn’t until the final month of the prior administration, in December 2024, that efforts to secure a comprehensive backup system were initiated. Given the volume of sensitive data, the backup process is complex and takes several months to complete,” the office said.

New District Attorney Robert Busbee has since prioritized cybersecurity, allowing the office to limit the recent attack in some ways and prevent “what could have been catastrophic data loss.”

“That decision proved crucial this morning, as it allowed IT specialists to detect the cyber intrusion in real time and intervene before any significant data could be compromised,” he said in a statement.