Garfield County was forced to pay a ransom to gain access to their own data after a massive ransomware attack hit their computer systems. According to FOX 13, county officials weren’t able to access their computers for weeks.
“All of our data had been taken,” Garfield County Attorney Barry Huntington told FOX 13.
The attack occurred after someone clicked on a phishing email earlier in the year that launched the ransomware attack. The computer virus stole data from a number of county offices and then locked it away.
Huntington said files from the Assessor’s Office and the Recorder’s Office had been taken and no one knew how or why.