The Voice • January 2019
Kurt Michael recently made the unfortunate discovery that mold existed in the basement of his home. A lawsuit was brought against the home builder in attempts to resolve the issue with the residence. In preparing the lawsuit documentation, Michael discovered that the Bedford County Courthouse in Bedford, VA were not able to provide the stamped blueprints used to build his house. The blueprint records had been lost two years prior as the result of a ransomware virus attack on the Courthouse computer system.
Bedford County Chief Information Technology Officer, Jeffrey Marecic gave a statement regarding the situation involving the virus attack on the courthouse. “The IT team at the time made every effort to recover as much of the lost data as possible, but were unable to recover everything,” explained Marecic. [1] Since the virus permanently destroyed portions of the county data, achieving complete data recovery was not possible. Recovery efforts by the county have since ended.
Marecic continued, stating that “the County has invested a lot of time and money in upgrading systems and improving information security to avoid this kind of malware attack in the future.” [1]
Homeowner Kurt Michael told local news outlets that he was upset by this because he was not informed that his records were lost and concluded that he was likely not the only person affected by the incident.
Sources
https://wset.com/news/local/virus-hits-bedford-county-system-years-ago-destroying-files
