Bingham County’s system up and running after ransom ware virus

Bingham County’s computer systems were up and running again at about 98 percent on Tuesday, a week after a countywide outage. Hackers got into the county’s systems and demanded ransom for Bingham County to its get access again.

“I don’t think any of our court records or anything like that have been compromised. We have an extensive backup system, and it’s just a matter of retrieving those files and putting them back in place,” said Ladd Carter, a Bingham County commissioner.

There were only a few computers that haven not been cleaned out from the cyberattack by Tuesday. The hackers wanted the county to give them $28,000 to get access to the system and files, but the county was able to get around the ransom.

“We didn’t cave into that, but it’s probably going to cost that much or more by the time we get everything unraveled,” Carter said.

With Bingham County’s insurance for cyberattacks all hands were on deck. Help from the county’s contracted information technology service came from Boise and even as far as Denver. When Bingham County tried to continue operations during the past week, county employees went back to pen and paper.

“A lot of that will have to go back be entered in the computers later on. The recording and stuff that we’ve not been able to do, has to be entered in later,” Carter said.

County commissioners say it is safe to say that Bingham County will be 100 percent operational by Wednesday morning.