Still no answers as to when Wexford County Administration will be back operating as normal.
Wexford County has been dealing with the aftermath of a ransomware attack that happened on election day in November.
More than two months later, Wexford County Administrator, Joe Porterfield, said most phone systems are back up, with the exception of a few departments like the main line to the sheriff’s office and the register deeds.
Porterfield said the cyber-attack is also impacting their ability to put some servers back online safely including the Register Of Deeds.
That’s having a huge effect on completing real estate transactions in the county without being able to verify certain records.
“I don’t throw a timeline out there, just to pacify somebody and kick the can down the road later. That’s probably the biggest and most important part of transparency is making sure that if there’s information being released, it’s truthful and so, that’s why I didn’t know where we were at until it was actually Tuesday of last week when I realized, yes, that we we’ve got data from 2016 to 1986 that we can use,” said Porterfield.
Porterfield said records from 2016 to the present they have no data on, but they do have images of those records saved on rolls of film. Porterfield said they are hoping to scan and create a digital database that can be uploaded to the Register of Deeds Program. They have reached out to a company to get estimates and a timeline but beyond that had no answers as to when the problem will be fixed.
Porterfield also was not able to say how much the ransomware attack has cost the county so far.