Statewide data breach includes county

Carroll County officials said last week that there’s no evidence that any of the county’s electronic data was compromised after a security breach that affected counties across the state.

According to Carroll County Judge Ronda Griffin and county clerk Connie Doss, some but not all of the county’s servers operate on a network administered by Little Rockbased Apprentice Information Systems Inc.

“(Apprentice) had a breach,” Griffin said Wednesday, Nov. 9. “Now, we don’t know what the extent of the breach is, but in order to secure what we had, they advised us to go in on Saturday and shut down all servers and computers and absolutely make it go dark.”

Griffin said Doss went into all county buildings and shut down any servers and other devices connected to the Apprentice network.

“We did everything that we were cautioned to do,” Griffin said. “However, Little Rock sent out an email (Tuesday, Nov. 8) and said since they still were unaware of exactly what the breach was … to just be aware and perhaps let our banking institutions know when we get our check that there’s a possibility that our information could have been compromised. We don’t know that. We’re not going to have a clue for a while.”

Griffin said Apprentice works with almost every county in the state.

“This is a statewide thing,” she said. “It’s not just Carroll County.”

Doss said she and some other county employees were working on Saturday, Nov. 5, when they were notified of the breach.

“Because we were here, we were able to shut down quickly,” she said. “That may not have been the case in a lot of counties.”

Doss said the county payroll was processed manually, with no disruptions to employees being paid on time.

“County employees still got paid, and paid on time,” she said.

Griffin said a crew from Apprentice was in Carroll County last Wednesday.

“They are getting it back up and going,” Griffin said. “To our knowledge, our information has not been breached.”