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Strafford County Quickly Recuperates From Cyberattack

Emily Corwin for NHPR

The computer system for  Strafford County’s government is close to getting fully back online, after a cyberattack led the county to shut down some of its servers. 

 

Early Friday, the Strafford County IT Department started to receive reports of problems with a few computers at the county Sheriff's Department. They detected a virus and decided the safest approach was to temporarily shut down the system, which included computers in the jail, the nursing home and county offices.  

 

Raymond Bower, the Strafford County Administrator, says the county has prepared for an attack like this and their response managed to protect their records.

 

“In order to stop the spread of it, we took our system down, that’s part of what we drill on,” said Bower. “There was no data breach. No one got access to our data.” 

 

Bower said the county has kept services operating using traditional pen and paper records-keeping.

“Is it inconvenient? Oh yeah,” said Bower. “But there’s no impact on anybody that we provide direct care to or gets county services.”

Officials say that they expect the full system to be up and running by tomorrow. Then they plan to work with the county sheriff's department to trace the source of the attack.

 

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