CHATHAM'S 'CYBER INCIDENT'

Stolen Chatham county data posted online after cyber incident, includes personnel files, other sensitive documents

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Sensitive data files stolen following Chatham County’s Oct. 28 governmental “cyber incident” have been posted online by the criminal enterprise responsible, the News + Record has learned.

The files include such things as personnel records of some county employees, medical evaluations of children who are the subjects of neglect cases, eviction notices and documents related to ongoing investigations within the Chatham County Sheriff’s office.

The News + Record obtained access to websites containing the digital files using information provided by a source on the condition of anonymity. County officials later confirmed to the newspaper that sensitive data had been released by the ransomware group known as DoppelPaymer. The international criminal organization has carried out similar attacks on government and health care organizations worldwide, typically asking the victims to pay ransom or risk the release of sensitive information.

DoppelPaymer uploaded at least two batches of Chatham County’s data on both the “dark web” — encrypted online sites not found via conventional search engines — and the “light” web, making them accessible via certain key search criteria.

A post on the DoppelPaymer site gives the URL for the county’s website and a one-sentence history of Chatham — “The county was named for the Earl of Chatham in England, who was William Pitt … now you know how Pittsboro got its name.” It also provides links to “example files” uploaded to the site as a result of the theft. The file links contain names such as “deceased,” “insurance,” “Sheriff,” “Finance,” “other” and “HR.”

The folders under the link labeled “Sheriff” include folders labeled applications, benefits, disciplinary documents, personnel actions, employee evaluations and more.

The first data upload was made Nov. 4, a week after Chatham County officials announced the breach; it contained “mostly innocuous” files, Chatham County Manager Dan LaMontagne, told the News + Record on Monday, including files that fall under North Carolina’s public records laws.

But a second upload in late January contained more sensitive data, as evidenced by screenshots obtained by the newspaper and confirmed by LaMontagne. The page containing the files has been viewed more than 30,000 times, according to a counter on the site.

LaMontagne plans to release a summary report about the incident at the Chatham County Board of Commissioners’ regularly-scheduled meeting on Monday, as well as to the public. But on Tuesday, he acknowledged the county was working to address the issue of the public posting of files.

“Chatham County staff has been engaged with staff from the N.C. Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) and the N.C. Attorney General’s Office (AG) to ensure we meet the reporting requirements as it relates to protected health information (PHI) and/or personally identifiable information (PII) data,” LaMontagne told the News + Record. “We will continue to engage in these conversations with our cyber insurance attorney(s), DHHS, and the AG to ensure we respond in the most appropriate manner possible as it relates to the data accessed from our network during the event.

“Currently we are going through the files on the server that was encrypted to collect the names and addresses of individuals whose PII or PHI may be at risk of exposure,” LaMontagne said. “Those individuals will be notified of the situation and a call center will be available to those individuals for questions.”

LaMontagne would not comment on the specifics of a ransom or ransom amount — including the conjecture by at least one person claiming knowledge of the attack that culprits asked for a $500,000 Bitcoin payment — but said more information would be available in his report to commissioners.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” LaMontagne said last Friday in response to the Bitcoin ransom claim during an interview for a story published on the News + Record’s website over the weekend. “They were speculating if they did say that, because there’s some inaccuracy there for sure. But you know, this has happened in other places. You’ve seen similar situations in other places. It’ll be shared on the 15th exactly what it was. I really don’t want to talk about it until I let the board know.”

Ransomware is the deployment of malicious software — often through an email attachment opened by an unsuspecting recipient — to infect and lock computer networks or files until a ransom is paid. Upon payment, the victimized entity typically receives a decryption key to unlock its data. Those who don’t pay risk having sensitive information published, as happened in Chatham County’s case.

An accelerating trend

Chatham County’s network security breach is not an anomaly, Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft — a company which creates software to protect clients from malicious websites and malware — told the News + Record.

In October, a computer hacker hijacked government networks in Hall County, Georgia. When county officials refused to pay ransom, the hacker released election-related files online and escalated demands.

That same month, a cyberattack derailed operations at the University of Vermont’s medical center. Most hospital services shut down, and stayed down for weeks.

In March, Durham County and the City of Durham were blindsided by a malware attack, but Durham County said no data breach occurred, as in Chatham. It was the second time in four years that the county’s network behaved suspiciously, the first coming on Election Day in 2016. The election day issues in 2016 were caused by an internal administrative error, not a network security breach, investigations found.

Each attack confirmed a troubling pattern: Cyber “incidents” are becoming commonplace in local governments, which make easy pickings for cyber criminals.

“Serious barriers to their practice of cybersecurity include a lack of cybersecurity preparedness within these governments ...,” said a 2019 study by the University of Maryland, which Callow referenced on Emsisoft’s website. “Local governments as a whole do a poor job of managing their cybersecurity.”

The study cited data from a nationwide survey of local governments which had succumbed to cyberattacks. Almost two-thirds didn’t know how their networks were breached, and few had prevention systems in place to deter criminals. 

“The fact that governments are failing to implement basic and well-established best practices … can only be described as grossly negligent,” Emsisoft’s website says.

In most ransomware cases, files obtained by hackers are posted online after the victim entity refuses to pay a ransom. For those breached, Callow estimated that between 25% and 33% pay the ransom.

He said a well-designed computer network is segmented.

“In simple terms, that’s like having locks on the interior doors of a building,” Callow said. “It makes it much harder for an intruder. So, while somebody may be able to get into Fort Knox and perhaps even steal some toilet paper from a washroom, they’re probably not going to be able to get the gold, let alone walk away with it.”

Unfortunately, he said, studies and audits have demonstrated that local governments practice cybersecurity poorly. He cited a report issued by the State Auditor of Mississippi in October 2019 that stated there was a “disregard for cybersecurity in state government,” that “many state entities are operating like state and federal cybersecurity laws do not apply to them,” and identified problems including:

• Not having a security policy plan or disaster recovery plan in place.

• Not performing legally mandated risk assessments.

• Not encrypting sensitive information.

“To be clear, that’s not necessarily entirely their fault,” Callow said. “Local government insecurity is, at least in part, likely due to a lack of funding. They practice security poorly because they don’t have the budgets to practice it better. And this is why more than 200 local governments have been impacted by ransomware in the last two years. It’s a big problem and, unfortunately, one that is only likely to get worse unless strong action is taken.”

Emsisoft’s own survey of cyber attacks estimated that at least 2,354 US governments, healthcare facilities and schools were impacted by cyber events in 2020, including 113 federal, state and municipal governments and agencies. The company estimated the cost of those attacks on governments at $915 million.

Chatham working on recovery

Before learning about the worst of the stolen files, the damage was daunting enough, but LaMontagne says the county is “pretty close” to a full recovery.

Despite having previously discussed the possibility of a security breach, the county could never have fully anticipated one’s extent, or the work it would take to recover.

Now, the hard drives of nearly all of the county’s desktop and laptop computers — more than 500 of them — have been wiped clean, stripped down and reimaged, and are back working. Phones and voicemail are functioning. Employees, who improvised for weeks with hastily-created gmail.com email addresses, and worked from their own personal computers and tablets and cell phones, have working email accounts using the county’s new “chathamcountync.gov” domain extension. Servers have been rebuilt. Fewer and fewer work tasks are being performed “by hand” or using what LaMontagne described as “’80s technology.”

The source of the breach, LaMontagne told the News + Record, wasn’t “super-secret” information. He just wanted the commissioners to hear it first.

What will remain secretive is how the county is ensuring such breaches don’t occur again.

“We did quite a bit to enhance security,” LaMontagne said.

Did he want to say specifically what those changes were?

“No.”

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said, “where the alarms are set.”

What LaMontagne did reveal, though, is the value he placed on seeing his staff persevere throughout the last few months in extraordinary circumstances.

“That’s why I said our ‘Employee of the Year’ was every single, solitary employee we have,” he said. “You can’t pick one. There’s too many good people. And everybody went through a lot of tough things. Each individual, each individual department and each individual employee in those departments just stepped up in the way they needed to, and has been through a lot of adversity with the pandemic and this event. It’s been a big challenge.”

The work related to repairing the intangible costs of the breach will also pose a challenge — possibly for some time to come.

In the meantime, Callow and other experts said the only answer to ransomware was simple: never, ever pay the ransom.

“It’s always the wrong decision,” he said. “It simply incentivizes the criminals and in no way guarantees that you will get your data back. The only way to stop this is to make it unprofitable. It’s going to continue to be a problem as long as it’s profitable.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was updated on Thursday morning to clarify that the suspicious network behavior in Durham County on Election Day in 2016 was caused by an internal administrative error, not by a malware attack. The story was also updated to specify that the malware attack in 2020 did not cause a data breach in Durham County or the City of Durham.