FAYETTEVILLE — The attempted cyberattack on Washington County’s computer systems has apparently ended with the county having blocked more than 64,000 attempts to log on to its servers.
Tad Sours, the county’s communications director, said Tuesday morning the attempts to log on to the county’s systems seemed to have ended. The so-called “dictionary attack” began Friday when county officials blocked more than 14,000 attempts to log on to its servers. On Saturday, the number grew to more than 17,000 and increased again on Sunday with more than 33,000 efforts to access county servers being detected and blocked.
“There were only 176 attempted log-ons Monday and zero so far today,” Sours said Tuesday morning. “It does appear they tried us for the weekend, and now they’ve moved on.”
Sours said the county’s information technology staff had done a great job handling the incident. He said there were no problems stemming from the attempts to access the system.
“The best way to look at this is it was a great exercise in how to deal with this kind of thing,” Sours said. “Our tactics worked. It’s always going to be a learning and training experience.”
County officials described the cyberattack as what’s called a “dictionary attack,” which TechTarget.com describes as a method of breaking into a password-protected computer, network or other IT resource by systematically entering every word in a dictionary as a password. A dictionary attack can also be used in an attempt to find the key necessary to decrypt an encrypted message or document. Dictionary attacks work because many computer users and businesses insist on using ordinary words as passwords, according to TechTarget.com.
The city of Fayetteville was hit by a cyberattack in June. According to information from the city, it appeared someone changed several system files in an internal city application about 4 a.m. June 8. The action decreased the performance of the city’s server. City staff shut down online systems as a precautionary measure to contain any potential damage.
A report from the state found 130 cybersecurity incidents were reported to Legislative Audit from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, at 75 public bodies across the state ranging from higher education institutions and public school districts to cities and state agencies.
The number is an increase from the 63 incidents reported from July 28, 2021, to June 30, 2022. Of the 130 reported cybersecurity incidents in fiscal 2023, 73 have been resolved and 57 remain under investigation.
The report defines a cybersecurity incident as “any event that compromises the security, confidentiality or integrity of an entity’s information systems, applications, data or networks.”