DETROIT (WXYZ) — Weeks before the presidential election, Wayne County government has fallen victim to a cyberattack.
"I’m very concerned, membership is concerned as well," said Wayne County Criminal Defense Bar Association President Lillian Diallo.
It started Wednesday morning affecting the Wayne County Treasurer's Office, Register of Deeds, county websites and the Wayne County Sheriff's Office.
Video below shows the Wayne County website down:
Diallo said it's been difficult to get a grasp of what all is being affected.
In her own line of work, she knows that because of the attack, jail inmates cannot be bonded out.
She said that for her alone on Wednesday, "It looks like four clients wanted to go bail out somebody and they could not bail them out."
Watch our initial report when the hack happened in the video below:
That's not all.
Residents cannot pay their taxes online, real estate sales cannot be recorded and property records cannot be obtained.
"You really have to take this stuff seriously and make sure your firewalls are up," Diallo said. "Because I believe we are going to have way more of these as we get closer and closer to November."
On Thursday, the Wayne County Commission met at the Guardian Building in Detroit. Normally, the meeting would have been on Zoom, but that was not possible due to the attack.
7 News Detroit attended the meeting and spoke to County Commission Chair Alisha Bell.
She told us she's never seen this happen with the county before.
"Right now, we are working with the state police and the FBI, and they’re working with our IT professionals," Bell said.
According to Bell, some of their internal files were encrypted during the attack. She said it could have been much worse if their firewalls weren't up and working.
"We’ve seen a lot of government agencies getting targeted, especially since the start of this year," Kaustubh Medhe said.
Medhe is the vice president of Research & Threat Intelligence at Cyble, a cyber threat intelligence firm.
"In fact, we’ve seen in the last six months almost 20 different counties and government department across the U.S. getting targeted," he said.
Medhe said the attacks are almost always ransomware attacks, meaning the attacker is demanding money.
There's no word on how much this attacker may be demanding, how long it will take to get the county back up and running or who the attacker may be.
