NATCHEZ — Adams County government offices have been unable to conduct any online business for over a week due to a reported cyber attack.
Officials said Wednesday that they expect to be back online Thursday after a costly system overhaul worth over $250,000.
Since the server crash on Friday, April 17, officials determined the cause was a type of “ransomware.”
However, “We never actually got a ransom note,” Adams County Supervisor Kevin Wilson said on Wednesday.
Adams County Emergency Management sent out a countywide alert on Monday, April 20, via HyperReach to alert residents of an outage affecting all county government offices.
Wilson said a report had been made to the FBI, which confirmed there had been an attack that remains under investigation.
The attack locked out county workers from “almost everything,” including the ability to access digital civil and circuit records or collect any payments for car tags or public records, Wilson said.
The Adams County Sheriff’s Office, which uses a server independent from the rest of the county, is unaffected, Sheriff Travis Patten said.
“Because what we do is extremely important, I made sure our servers are separate from the rest of the county’s so that we would not be affected by a ransom attack like this and that we have our own ransomware protections in place,” Patten said.
The Board of Supervisors voted last Friday at a special meeting on an emergency purchase to allow Netlink, a company based in Flowood, to start the work of updating every county computer to Windows 11 software, replacing computers that cannot support it, and having 24/7 cybersecurity monitoring for approximately $227,000.
