Rocky Top computers are hit by hackers
Rocky Top City Hall has become the second municipality in Anderson County to be hit by computer hackers during the past month, as the city’s computer system was breached sometime on Thursday, April 13, according to Mayor Kerry Templin.
“Our city recorder was very attentive and caught an anomaly as she was getting ready to leave at the end of the day,” he said.
Cybersecurity experts were called in immediately, and the FBI was notified of the breach, the mayor said.
But so far, the city has not lost any money because of the breach, and no sensitive information has been stolen, “as far as we know,” Templin said.
“We were incredibly lucky,” he added.
He said it will be “about another 10 days” before the city knows the full extent of the breach, but that indications so far are that no customers’ personal information was accessed, and no personnel records were taken.
“Our personnel files are not online anyway,” Templin said. “From an efficiency standpoint, that’s bad, but from a security standpoint, it’s good.”
Oak Ridge experienced a serious malware attack starting on March 20 that the city is still working to resolve, and which reportedly has cost Oak Ridge more than $515,000 in emergency spending to deal with.
There, the city had to delay sending out water bills for April as one consequence of the cyberattack, but those are now going out, Oak Ridge officials have announced.
So far, the attack on the Rocky Top computer systems has not caused major issues other than with the city’s banking systems, although the city was forced to stop taking credit card payments temporarily, Templin said.
“We’re in the process of getting everything back in order,” the mayor said Monday. “We haven’t lost anything. But we’re doing a comprehensive audit of our cybersecurity, and we did have to shut down everything in our computer systems. We couldn’t take credit cards for at least a day.”
He said no money was taken from any of the city’s bank accounts, “even though it looks like most everything took place on the banks’ end.”
Rocky Top’s saving grace might have been that the city is still operating most of its systems manually, and is still doing most accounting by hand,” Templin said.
“The only way to affect our water system is to show up and turn a valve off yourself,” he said. “We have no computerized, automated services,” he said.
“There will be a day in the future when we will have, though, so we need to plan for this to lessen the risk of anything happening in the future.”
Templin said Rocky Top officials alerted other area governments about the breach almost immediately, but so far, no others have reported any problems.
Norris City Manager Adam Ledford said his staff went on “high alert” on Thursday afternoon after learning of the Rocky Top hacking, and immediately called in its outside cybersecurity team.
At Clinton, City Manager Roger Houck said Monday that there have been no problems there so far.
“We put in a couple of extra layers of protection to our IT systems after Oak Ridge was hacked,” he said.
In Rocky Top, Templin said Monday: “One thing I’ve learned is that it’s a good time to be in the cybersecurity business. This has certainly caused us a lot of extra work and some sleepless nights.”
