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Eastern Idaho's Madison County Hit By Cyber Attack

Kjetil Korslien
/
Flickr

Madison County in eastern Idaho is still reeling from a cyber attack over the weekend. The hackers put ransomware into Madison County’s computer system.

“It’s been a week, I’ll tell ya that,” says a slightly exasperated Kim Muir, the Madison County Clerk.

On Sunday night, the County’s system was attacked with ransomware. Since it came in over the weekend – a long weekend because of Columbus Day – Muir says she doesn’t think the malicious software was let in by way of a tainted email attachment.

Muir says the attack came at a particularly bad time.

“Our courts were going live with the Odyssey software; it’s the new court system that’s gone in statewide,” says Muir. “Without emails and calendars it just made it hard to enter in the information they needed.”

And, possibly worse, payroll was impacted.

“That created some havoc,” Muir says. “That was IT’s first priority, to get that up and running so that those paychecks would be in employees' accounts this (Oct. 11) morning.”

Madison County’s IT Department is big on backing up the system, and Muir says they’ve successfully restored much of it to Saturday night before the ransomware attack. There’s no evidence any personal information was compromised.

For more local news, follow the KBSX newsroom on Twitter @KBSX915

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