MOUNT VERNON — The Knox County Recorder’s Office is among the scores of agencies affected by a cyberattack on its records management vendor, Cott Systems.
County Recorder Tanner Salyers said Knox County’s system went down on Dec. 26, 2022. It came back up yesterday but went down again today.
“Knox County was not the target of the attack, it was an attack on the company that we utilize,” Salyers said. “It took down 300 governments in 21 states. Eight or nine in Ohio are dealing with this, including Morrow and Delaware counties.
“Our data is secure. It’s really a matter of getting their servers up and running again,” he added.
Cott Systems manages data such as public records, court cases, and land records. Salyers said the company is working with the FBI and Homeland Security to resolve the issue.
While the records system is down, staff members in the recorder’s office are accepting documents, stamping them with the date they are accepted, and accepting money. When the system comes back online and the data is entered, staff will back-date documents to the date they were accepted.
CES Credit Union is storing documents in a fireproof safe while the system is down. When the system came back online yesterday, staff members worked to enter much of the backlog.
Cott officials have not said whether the attack involved Ransomware, Spyware, or some other malware. The company did say it suspects the attack is by a group that has been targeting state and local governments; whether the attack is government-backed, Cott cannot confirm at this time.
“We are not to this point yet, but if it goes on too long, banks can’t issue mortgages because they can’t verify titles,” Salyers said.
Salyers said Knox County is one of the few Ohio counties that have all of its records online. To move to another vendor could take months.
Immediately upon hearing of the cyberattack, Salyers started reviewing vendor contracts, looking to get out of the contracts. He also researched other vendors.
“We have a vendor who has a platform ready for us,” he said. “We could be up in a week. That speaks to the willingness of this vendor to work with us.”
Salyers said there has been a lack of communication with Cott, and the company has given no time frame for resolving the issue.
“We have been with Cott for 20-plus years, and they have been good to work with up to this point,” Salyers said. “But my first responsibility is to the citizens of Knox County and to preserve this data. It’s literally in my job description to preserve, maintain and make records available to the county, and they are preventing me from doing that.
“While the technology is out of our hands, what’s not out of our hands is how we respond to it, and we are responding,” he added.
In addition to moving toward a vendor that has the redundancies to safeguard data that Cott lacks, even though redundancies are specified in the contract, Salyers said the county is identifying and changing in-house redundancies and contingencies.
“We are working with the county IT department on an internal server that will, at the minimum, maintain our images so we will never be in a position to not view titles,” he said.
Salyers previously took steps to move microfilm backup closer to the county geographically so that it will be quicker to access. He said the goal of redundancies and contingencies is that “everybody expects continuity of government, no matter what.”
“There has been a definite failure on Cott’s end, but we have adapted as best we can and responded in a responsible way,” he said. “We have taken action in the best way we can and have taken steps to make sure it will never happen again.”
