Taylor County's email system down due to ransomware attack
Some Taylor County employees still were without email service at noon Wednesday because of a reported ransomware attack against the company that provides the service.
Taylor County Commissioners were informed Tuesday that early Friday morning, the San Antonio-based company, Rackspace, reported a security incident.
"The hack is not on our (end), it's on theirs," Taylor County Judge Downing Bolls said in a phone call Tuesday night.
Rackspace has been the county's provider for a number of years, with 559 accounts served. Of those, 295 are web mail-based accounts, which were not affected.
The rest are hosted exchange accounts, all of which have been affected.
The former are reserved for employees without multiple streams of access to their email, while the latter is reserved for people who have a desktop machine and email on their phones, etc.
"It has not been a pleasant five days now," Rebecca Eidson, the county's IT director, told commissioners in a special called meeting Tuesday.
It was unclear, Eidson told commissioner, if personal information contained in emails was compromised.
Eidson said she had hoped that the company could easily solve the issue, but that the best solution now appears to be switching to another provider.
County mails come in through multiple filters, and the county has mail filters it also uses, she said.
"But if they (Rackspace) have an email that comes into one of their employees, then that would affect their system," she said.
The company had not released any information as of Tuesday morning about how the ransomware attack happened, Eidson said.
Currently, the county pays Rackspace $2,402.68, she said.
If it converted all 559 mailboxes to a different provider, it is possible that it could switch to a new plan that could save money..
"But we will, though, for a while have to carry both (providers)," she said, in the hope in the hope of getting some historical data back and because of the extensive process of migrating emails.
Commissioner Randy Williams said the savings potentially could help cover the cost of maintaining both providers over the time required to complete the process.
"We will have to set a priority for whose emails get touched first," Eidson said. "IT is going to be some of the first ones done because in order to facilitate these contracts, we have to have communications. And we've already done some things so we can have some outside communication. But it's not nearly what I need it to be."
Bolls said the county's systems work "beautifully most of the the time."
But in a world rife with cyber attacks, "things like this are inevitable, they're going to happen."
"And someday, it's your day," he said.
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Taylor County's email system down due to ransomware attack
