St. Lucie Sheriff's Office unable to provide records, reports after almost three weeks
ST. LUCIE COUNTY — The Sheriff's Office has been unable to process records requests since early this month due to "network issues," the latest county-government operation to be left unable to perform critical functions because of computer issues.
Residents and others have tried unsuccessfully to get copies of important traffic crash reports that are often required for insurance claims or legal proceedings.
"The Sheriff's Office is currently experiencing network issues," according to a Sheriff's Office Facebook post from Nov. 2, nearly three weeks ago. "As a result, we are unable to process public records requests at this time. This includes copies of traffic crash reports, incident reports, etc. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this."
Could it have been a security breach?
In a written statement Monday, Sheriff Ken Mascara indicated that his office's outage may have been the result of a security breach.
"We are making sure our system is clean of any malware. Unfortunately, this process takes time. We apologize for any inconvenience," Mascara said.
In an email Monday, a Sheriff's Office spokesperson declined to provide further updates on the outage or say whether it is related to outages the previous week at the county commissioners' and tax collector's offices, the latter of which has been claimed by a notorious hacker group. Those outages, which began Oct. 27, were also initially attributed to "network issues."
Issues different from county commissioners, tax collector
Still, county spokesperson Erick Gill said in an email that the Sheriff Office outage was "separate from ours."
More: Hacker gang claims St. Lucie County breach, tax collector says sensitive info not at risk
More: Some services still offline as network issues continue for St. Lucie County, tax collector
Contact local departments for records
The Sheriff's Office spokesperson declined to go beyond Mascara's statement. There also was no advice for what individuals seeking records and reports should do in the meantime.
The county, which operates the 911 call center used by the Sheriff's Office and local police departments, lost access to a number of phone lines when its system went down, but the 911 center remained able to take calls. It is "fully operational," according to Gill, and management there is working with the Sheriff's Office and other agencies to ensure calls are catalogued correctly, Gill said.
Anyone seeking law enforcement records, such as police or traffic reports, should contact the specific agency involved, Gill said. The county is responsible only for records held by the 911 call center, like the call logs and recordings themselves.
Wicker Perlis is TCPalm's Watchdog Reporter for St. Lucie County. You can reach him at wicker.perlis@tcpalm.com and 504-331-0516.
This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Malware could have taken down St. Lucie County Sheriff records system
