Some Cobb County websites are down, impacting online county services that are gradually coming back throughout the day, officials said.
“Unusual activity” from outside the county’s system, possibly by a hacker, was detected on the county’s internet servers Friday and the technology department took them offline to begin a maintenance operation over the weekend, according to a county spokesman.
Restoration is taking longer than expected, and the county is still working to restore access to some sites, spokesman Ross Cavitt said.
"At this time, the county website, bill pay services, and phone systems are operating normally. However, we do not yet have a timeline for full system restoration," Cavitt said in a statement.
Officials are still working to determine whether any data was compromised.
Last year, a major ransomware attack on Fulton County’s web system caused outages and prolonged issues accessing county services and information. Hackers in that case placed a countdown clock on the website, threatening to release sensitive information if the county did not pay a ransom, the AJC reported at the time.
Cavitt said Cobb County’s investment in protecting their web systems seems to have prevented a larger-scale attack.
Concerns over cyber attacks have grown in recent years among local governments.
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