ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Anne Arundel County is recovering after a "cyber incident" led to shuttered offices and a network offline as they worked urgently to limit damage to their internal systems.
The discovery was made about four weeks ago, though information remains limited, as cyber security consultants have recommend the county not share too much.
“The external actors, they don't go away just because you found out they were there. They're still around somewhere and they're trying to figure out how to, in some cases, do damage,” County Executive Steuart Pittman said.
Pittman says the situation has become less urgent over time as they’ve made progress. Last week, the country restored network access.
“I think we're in better shape than we were before,” he said.
Before then, departments still had to get their jobs done which meant having to think outside the box.
“We have inside county government people who are willing to be creative and innovative," Pittman said. "[And] work extra hard to provide the public services even though the tools disappeared."
Director of the Anne Arundel County Department of Inspections and Permits Mark Wedemeyer says it was a real team effort to not fall behind.
The office, on average, receives 120 permit applications a day.
“Just seeing everyone to come together as a team... They just really jumped in,” Wedemeyer, said. “I go back to COVID and how it made us resilient to things that are minor setbacks."
Anne Arundel County is still recovering from the cyber incident discovered nearly four weeks ago
Many worked from home on the first day following the discovery.
In Wedemeyer’s department, permit applications had to be done in-person manually.
Payments were only accepted by cash or check and because the printers were connected to the network, they had to improvise by providing personal individual printers.
“When I see customers in the lobby they said that we really didn’t miss a beat,” Wedemeyer said. “The day we were closed to the public, we made that day up in two days.”
On the Animal Care and Control side, staff did Facebook Lives to show off adoptable animals when their website couldn’t be updated.
Background checks couldn’t be done, so potential adopters became fosters until the they could go through
“The outcome was still the animals found homes,” Pittman said.
He’s has promised the public will know more information in due time, though there still may be information that cannot be shared.
There’s no set timeline on when everything will be back up and running.
