An unknown individual or entity broke into the Linn County Sheriff’s Office’s computer system last week and although emergency dispatch services never went completely down, the episode caused disruptions for the agency and its regional partners, including the Philomath Police Department and Philomath Fire and Rescue.
Linn County Sheriff Michelle Duncan said the breach was discovered at around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 24.
“We had been given some information that there might be someone on our computer system that shouldn’t be,” Duncan said. “We went and saw that there was activity in our system from an outside source that was unauthorized.”
An investigation into the source of the breach is ongoing, Duncan said.
“It appears that the entity was basically in what they call a reconnaissance mode where they were able to get in and look at stuff on our infrastructure but hadn’t really done much with it yet,” Duncan said.
Duncan said no data was compromised.
“We never got any ransomware or anything like that … Hopefully we caught them early and we are going to look at it and just make sure that we’re continuing to monitor it — looking at different security measures to prevent anything happening in the future,” she said.
The final servers impacted by the breach were back up Tuesday, six days after the breach had been discovered.
“It’s been a lot of work for IT (information technology) staff to comb through everything and make sure things are safe and putting additional security measures in place,” Duncan said.
The Linn County Sheriff’s Office serves as the host agency as part of a shared computerized response system, which includes Philomath Police, Benton County Sheriff’s Office, Corvallis Police, Philomath Fire and Rescue and other emergency responders.
Duncan said all of LCSO’s partners were immediately notified when the breach occurred.
“We were able to basically take some different steps to isolate them and then remove them from our system,” Duncan said about the outside entity. “In notifying our partner agencies, which includes both police and fire departments, we gave them the choice of what they chose to do. I think some of them did take them offline, I think it was for a matter of hours.”
Officials reported no disruptions in the availability to the public of the 911 emergency response system.
“We actually never took our dispatch services offline because we were watching everything that was happening right then and there,” Duncan said. “With the assistance of some state and federal cybersecurity partners, we were able to check all of our systems. … We never lost any operations on our end.”
Corvallis Police Lt. Ben Harvey said the episode disrupted a computer program used by the Corvallis Regional Communications Center for a few hours last week but added “the impact did not affect service delivery and our dispatch center remained open the entire time.”
Philomath Fire and Rescue Deputy Fire Chief Rich Saalsaa said its alert system software was down for nearly a week with personnel going old-school with pen and paper as calls came in. When the breach occurred Jan. 24, he said the fire district was forced to utilize a manual system that among other things included the use of Google Maps to pinpoint locations — a plan, he added, that was employed within minutes.
Saalsaa said the CRCC dispatch system’s computer issue impacted Philomath Fire and Rescue for nearly 12 hours beginning Wednesday night and into Thursday morning.
Philomath Police Chief Ken Rueben said his office experienced computer-related issues for a little over a day.
“We’ve been continuing to monitor and look at it just to make sure our systems are completely clean,” Duncan said. “Over the next few days, we’re confident that we’re in good shape.”
Duncan estimated that it was seven years ago when LCSO, Albany Police and local fire agencies transitioned to a new computer-aided dispatch system. A CAD system serves various functions — a couple of examples would be the collection of information that’s sent on to responders during an emergency call or serving as a records management system for police agencies.
A few years later, Corvallis Police, Philomath Police and Benton County Sheriff’s Office came on board. Oregon State University Public Safety was the most-recent agency to join.
“It gives us the benefit of being able to share data, transfer calls quicker, those kinds of things, so it is a benefit for all of the agencies to have access to the same information,” Duncan said. “In fact, Corvallis 911, we have a mutual agreement that if anything happened to either one of our systems to where we just simply couldn’t dispatch, it’s literally the push of a button … to where our dispatchers could dispatch for them and their dispatchers could dispatch for us.”
