Shentel official: Email service back after ransomware attack | Nvdaily

EDINBURG — Shentel Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Elaine Cheng said Shentel customers’ emails should be working again as of Monday morning following a ransomware attack on the company’s third-party email provider, Mail2World.

Cheng said Mail2World started experiencing issues from the attack on Wednesday, Jan. 12. As a result, that made email services unavailable to Shentel customers.

“The partner was able to restore services on Sunday, and as of (Monday morning) our customers should have email services available to them,” Cheng said Monday. “Incoming mail that has been collecting during that time is slowly being propagated over the course of (Monday). So they won’t see it all immediately, but it should be back up and running.”

Cheng said as far as the company knows, no data associated with Shentel customers was compromised. 

Cheng said Shentel understands that customers were upset during the outage, but maintained that the outage was a “very unusual situation” and that most customers were “very patient.”

“It’s frustrating, and we are very sorry it happened,” Cheng said of the outage. “Even though it’s a third party that we work with, we understand to customers it’s Shentel. We get that. We’re very sorry and empathetic because for some people it is very problematic not to have their email. We’re apologetic and very sorry it happened.”

When something like an outage happens with Shentel services, Cheng said the process is to inform customers through posting messages on the Shentel website as well as social media platforms. She said there is also a tech department that handles complaints due to outages.

“We let people know information when we know. With this, we didn’t always know information from the third party,” Cheng said. “But when we knew information, we kept our messages updated.”

Cheng said Shentel is still evaluating the situation with the third-party email provider and determining how that relationship will be moving forward.

Customers still experiencing issues or working to resolve an issue can contact the customer service team at Shentel, Cheng said.

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