OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The Oak Ridge City Council said during a meeting on Monday that no personal information was compromised by a recent malware attack that knocked most of the city's business operations offline.
They said a single personnel file was accessed due to the attack, but they had no evidence that any information was extracted or shared. To protect city employees, Oak Ridge leaders said they were providing credit monitoring services to help protect employees.
They also said there was no evidence that any credit card information or taxpayer information was compromised.
In a special report about the malware attack, city leaders said the city brought in specialists to assess the attack. They said the city's public safety systems, firefighter systems, utility systems, wastewater systems and electric services were not affected. Primarily, the city's business operations were affected — including their email and internet services.
"Over the following days since the event has occurred, we have essentially been working nonstop with the specialists brought in to help us," said Amy Fitzgerald, the director of information services for Oak Ridge. "In terms of the recovery efforts and responses, as you can imagine, we had to review and assess every piece of hardware, every laptop."
They also said that the city had a disaster recovery plan in case of malware attacks, and they said that the plan had helped them prepare for it and act quickly.
The city made some emergency purchases and said there are some ongoing purchases that would be reported later. They said so far, the city spent around $515,800 total in emergency purchases because of the malware attack.
They said the forensic analysis and response also cost around $60,000 and technology services in conjunction with it also spent around $90,000. They also said they were working to migrate the city's email services to a new system. They said they also spent around $9,488 on credit monitoring services as well.
"No one wants to go through something like this," said Fitzgerald. "We are putting additional measures in place that will significantly reduce an incident like this from happening again."
Fitzgerald also said that the malware attack is still an "ongoing investigation."