Local, state, and natl: cyber attacks leave outages

(KAIR)–Cybersecurity attacks are behind a series of outages, in recent days, affecting services both locally and statewide.

As of November 25, the CodeRed emergency system used by Atchison County, and in turn the City of Atchison, to report emergency situations, remained down; and it’s possible that user account information “may have been compromised.”

That’s according to a release from Atchison County Emergency Management, which explained that the “OnSolve CodeRed public notification system remains down nationwide following a targeted cybersecurity incident,” meaning the “outage continues to prevent Atchison County from sending alerts through CodeRed until the vendor migrates us to their new notification platform.” The County adds, in the release, that they “are still waiting on OnSolve to complete this transition,” saying that “once the transition is finished, a test notification will be sent to all users.”

The outage was first announced by Emergency Management November 19.

The agency, in its release, says they were notified by OnSolve “that contact information from CodeRed user accounts may have been compromised,” including, names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and CodeRed account passwords.

The November 25 release says that while “at this time, there is no evidence that this information has been misused or published online,” it ads that “there is potential for it to be leaked,” with the release telling CodeRed users to, as a precaution, change the account password if used on other accounts and to be alert for phishing attempts, suspicious emails, links, or attachments.