A ransomware outbreak in Ohio, Cleveland has affected the area's IT infrastructure, causing Licking county to indefinitely turn off all phone and computer systems on its government network in order to halt the malware from spreading.

Ransomware is a type of malware that installs covertly on a device, executes a cryptovirology attack that adversely affects it and its files, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt it or not publish it.

All county offices remain open, but online access and landline telephones are not available for those on the county system," the Newark Advocate reported on Wednesday.

In an interview, Licking County Commissioner Tim Bubb said, "It's their (cyber-security experts and law enforcement) call to decide if we can get this resolved ourselves... We're dealing with a criminal element. It's a crime against the people of Licking County and its government."

The cyberattack forced the county's 911 Center, auditor's office and clerk of courts to perform their jobs manually.

The county has about 1,000 computers and a dozen servers according to the commissioner.

"The rest of this week we'll be in a manual mode... there's no promise everything will be up and running on Monday morning," Bubb said.

In a follow-up report, the county is trying to recover as quickly as possible to avoid any disruption to the citizenry's government-related transactions.

"It's fair to say we're making progress. We're evaluating our backups. We think our backups are pretty darn good," Bubb said.

"Some elements of our network were not affected... We pretty much know what server this came in on," he added.

He admitted there were lapses on their end, but said that they won't be playing the blame game and that they will try to improve their cybersecurity moving forward.

Bubb said there was some hope that phone service could be restored on Thursday, and the computer system could be available next week.

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Tags Ransomware