A cyberattack that hit the Knox County Recorder’s data vendor so badly that no records could be accessed prompted a change to a different data host.
Knox County Recorder Tanner Salyers said his office was not the target. Their vendor, Cott Systems of Columbus, was the victim of what he said was a very sophisticated attack.
As of Jan. 25, Cott Systems posted on its website: “Cott Systems is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Our internal email is functioning, and we can be reached at support@cottsystems.com.”
It was so bad that the Recorder’s Office could not accept recording online or access any records online, Salyers said. Records could still be taken in person over the counter. Though they still had physical books, those only go up to 2003.
“If you can't verify title you can’t buy a house in Knox County. Well, anywhere. So this is critically important that this get back online,” he said.
Freezing activity for the Recorder’s Office also freezes lending, Realtors and title companies. That can’t happen in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country with the $20 billion Intel plant deal. And three of the counties affected by Cott Systems were Delaware, Morrow and Knox.
Salyers said he started looking at contracts his office had with Cott Systems and what redundancies were supposed to be in place. At first, the conversation was that the vendor’s servers were down.
“Then the conversation kind of shifted in their communications to ‘We’re pretty sure your data is secure.’ And that’s when I got well, frankly, infuriated. Because the question should never be about how secure our data is,” he said.
The data would never have been totally lost because it is on microfilm, but it’s expensive and time-consuming to recover data from that medium.
Salyers began talking with other recorders that had dealt with similar issues, including the other nine Ohio counties that also were hosted at least in part by Cott Systems. Most vendors he contacted to get the records back online said what he was asking was a Herculean effort and couldn’t be done in less than several months.
But Compiled Technologies of Davisville, West Virginia, was able to complete that months-long process in three days, he said.
The new vendor, which has products installed in more than 100 counties, said they never had as easy an install as in Knox County. Salyers called that a huge thumbs up for Knox County and its commissioners for their investment in its IT Department.
“And if [Mount Vernon] City Council chose to enter into a contract with the county IT, they made a fantastic decision,” he said.
Integration of old data still needs to occur, though they are back online now. Knox County’s images were a rarity for rural counties.
“We’re back all the way to the founding of the county. We’ve got images all the way back to 1808,” Salyers said.
The integration needs to be completed, but it’s not critical, he said. Until that is completed, searches are broken into the old data and newer data.
Now data for the Knox County Recorder’s Office is internally hosted, which reduces risks as it’s a single county’s data, Salyers explained.
In addition to internal backups every few hours, Compiled Technologies will have encrypted backups in multiple locations. Restoration by Knox IT or the vendor could be completed within four to six hours.
Compiled Technologies’ system is Microsoft-based, Salyers said, providing a familiar environment for staff and the public.
