Cumberland County Register of Deeds online search down after ransomware attack
The Cumberland County Register of Deeds' online records were temporarily offline Thursday after ransomware infected one of the servers this week, Register of Deeds J. Lee Warren Jr. said.
The ransomware was discovered Wednesday afternoon on a server hosted in Greensboro, Warren said. Only one server was impacted, and no data was lost or compromised, he said.
“We’ve disabled that server, and we’re rebuilding that server and we’re rebuilding our website,” Warren said. “The images are on a separate server, and they weren’t affected.”
The attack also disabled Hoke County’s Register of Deeds website, Register of Deeds Elaine Brayboy said Thursday.
“Our documents were not in any way compromised,” she said. “We should be back up and going no later than Saturday.”
Warren said his office is working with the North Carolina Local Government Information Systems Association’s IT Strike Team and the North Carolina National Guard, members of the four-part North Carolina Joint Cybersecurity Task Force.
The North Carolina Department of Information Technology and North Carolina Emergency Management also belong to the task force, according to NCDIT spokesperson Nicole Meister.
“Along with other local, state and federal agencies, the (task force) provides technical guidance and support to government and educational entities faced with cyber threats,” Meister said Thursday.
Warren said the task force is working to discover who was behind the attack and how the ransomware infected the server.
“All of these players are in the process of trying to search for that now,” he said. “They’re professionals. They do this every day.”
Who's affected?
Warren said his office sent out a notice to the Fayetteville-based realtor association Longleaf Pine Realtors because the 2,400-member group uses their website daily.
Melissa McKinney, president of Longleaf Pine Realtors, said Thursday that the attack has inconvenienced realtors but won’t damage business.
“We use the website for things like deed searches, plat searches, records about properties that we’re about to list or that we’re representing a buyer and we want to verify the information,” she said. “In the world of real estate, the attorneys have gone to using the online system for recording closings so that we can transfer properties.”
In the years before the internet, attorneys sent runners to local courthouses to file deeds, and that practice will resume until the Register of Deeds office’s online search is back up, McKinney said.
“We’re going to have to do a little bit more legwork than we would normally have to do,” she said. “It’s not like real estate is going to halt. It’s just going to maybe slow things down a little bit by a few hours or whatever the case might be.”
Warren said that people can still visit the Register of Deeds office to search through physical records or on office computers.
He did not have an estimate for when the online records would be accessible.
“You just wouldn’t believe how busy we are,” Warren said. “It’s been like fighting fire down here all day.”
Got a tip for a follow-up on this story? Government watchdog reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com or 910-481-8526.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Cumberland County and Hoke County Registers of Deeds face ransomware
