WEXFORD COUNTY — New details emerging about the impact of a cyberattack that paralyzed some services in one Northern Michigan County, 10 months after it happened. That includes the hefty cost that came with it.
Wexford County Administrator Joe Porterfield said the cyberattack cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It was costly. And I can’t apologize enough to our taxpayers that this happened. We’re working hard to make sure that, you know, any future attacks are minimal. The security of the public’s information is critical, and we have to spend what it’s going to take to protect them as best we can,” said Porterfield.
The attacks happened back on election day in 2024 but the effects of it went on for months.
Porterfield said it ended up stopping real estate transactions for about half a year at the register of deeds office.
He said the people behind the attack, Embargo Ransomware, are a European group that normally goes after medical facilities.
“It just said who they were. They didn’t say a dollar amount, and they were a ransomware company. Please contact them. And, that you know, that they had accessed or had compromised our data,” said Porterfield.
He said the financial cost alone associated with the cyberattack is estimated at least half a million dollars and counting.
“It’s big. I mean, the amount of time having to have things recreated, the registers office itself, the contracts that we signed to have those 65,000 documents recreated was, you know, $180,000,” said Porterfield.
A lot of those expenses went to recovering their systems, restoring some documents that were lost, upgrading security, among other measures.
“We have contracted with a very robust cybersecurity firm. We’ve certainly increased our insurance. We’re looking at multiple backups, multiple backup locations, much tougher security features in-house, more multifactor authentication, those sorts of things,” said Porterfield.
He said he doesn’t believe any public information was breached, although internally, some personal personnel information may have been.
“We were able to find files for [ it looked like] 30 to 35 employees, so we don’t know that anybody was impacted. We just knew that there was a potential there,” said Porterfield.
He said they are doing what they can to ensure the attack won’t happen again.
“It was terrible for the people who couldn’t do business. Anytime government services can’t be taken care of. It’s not acceptable. So, we have to try to do better,” said Porterfield.
He said he is working on building back public trust and despite the expensive upgrades, he can’t guarantee a cyber-attack won’t happen again.
“I wish I could say ‘No, we’ll make sure this never happens again. But what I won’t do is lie to the taxpayers, our community, and say that it can’t happen,” said Porterfield.