Fulton county’s systems were hacked. Already weary officials are tight-lipped | Georgia

As a Fulton county, Georgia, board of registration and elections meeting began in earnest on Thursday afternoon, the elections director, Nadine Williams, unfurled a prepared statement about a recent hack of county government computers.

“There is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Williams said. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton county and the secretary of state’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts. We are working with our team to securely reconnect these systems as preparations for upcoming elections continue.”

Any time the Fulton county elections board meets, a cantankerous crowd greets them to pepper appointees with challenges to voter registrations or demands for paper ballots or generally unsympathetic noise. The rancor of the 2020 election and its unfounded charges of vote tampering still ripple through the democratic process. Elections officials in Fulton county take care about what they say, knowing that a platoon of critics lie waiting to pounce on a misplaced word.

Even by that standard, county officials have been holding uncharacteristically tightly to a prepared script – or saying nothing at all – in the days since a computer breach debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department to court records to phones.

“Because it’s under investigation, they’re telling me to stick to a list of talking points,” said the Fulton county commissioner Bridget Thorne. “The county attorney drafted them.”

She did say that the county had come under a ransomware attack – and that the county had not paid off the attacker. “We’re insured very well,” she said.

Systems began to fail on the weekend of 27 January. Ten days later, the phones for most departments returned a busy signal error when callers rang them up.

County officials either cannot or will not directly and completely answer important questions about the cyber-attack’s scope. The Fulton county chair Robb Pitts made a brief statement on 29 January about the hack without taking questions.