Fulton property tax payment system back online after hacking

County government has basically recovered from cyberattack.

Fulton County’s online property tax payment system has been restored following the Jan. 28 ransomware attack, and most county tax systems are moving to cloud storage, Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand announced Friday.

Among those functions moving to the cloud is credit-card payment processing, he said. The motor vehicle registration system is a state function, not stored on county computers, Ferdinand said.

The transition to cloud storage, instead of keeping data on the county’s own servers, usually takes several months but hard work by county personnel made the change in a few weeks, he said.

“So we are less vulnerable going forward,” Ferdinand said.

The tax commissioner’s office never closed during the computer crisis, though for a time it was limited to in-person or phone functions, he said. The office processed more than $50 million in property tax payments during February, Ferdinand said.

“Nonetheless, this was very inconvenient for all our citizens,” he said.

Now the office’s public-facing functions are restored, allowing online property tax payments, and the tax assessor’s office can again handle tax searches, Ferdinand said.

He spoke from County Commission chambers with Commission Chair Robb Pitts, giving the latest in a series of updates on service restoration, though Pitts again said they could not discuss the ongoing investigation into the cyberattack.

Pitts reiterated that the cyberattack “did not impact our voting systems in any way whatsoever.”

The county has received several questions about the ability to conduct background checks, Pitts said. The sheriff ’s office and Fulton County Police Department were unimpeded in doing those checks, but background checks by third parties of county court records were unavailable, he said.

Access for third-party background checks has been transferred to a new website, accessible through the court clerk’s page, he said.

The county has restored its phone service “with a very few exceptions,” and more good news on system restoration should be coming soon, Pitts said.

The ransomware attack, claimed by the LockBit hacking gang, took down many of the county’s internal and external systems. Hackers set a countdown on the dark web and threatened to release stolen county documents including residents’ personal information if an unspecified ransom wasn’t paid.

But a massive international law enforcement takedown Feb. 19, not directly related to the Fulton County hack, seized computer servers and cryptocurrency accounts used by LockBit. The ransomware deadline passed, was reset and elapsed again with no release of data. The takedown apparently cut the hackers off from the data they stole.

Pitts said neither the county nor anyone on its behalf paid any ransom. At the March 6 commission meeting, County Manager Dick Anderson said there had been no further threat received to release personal data.

Pitts has said if any residents’ sensitive personal data were exposed, the county will provide identity-theft protection for them.