Town of Waxhaw recovering after being targeted in cybercriminal attack

WAXHAW, N.C. — The town of Waxhaw is recovering from a cybercriminal attack.

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Bradley Lucore, the town’s communication director, said it all began on Friday when they started to notice irregularities in their network. They sent employees home.

“Our IT department shut down the network and took some proactive measures to protect us,” said Lucore.

He said they called in the North Carolina Joint Cyber Security Task Force and other agencies, who are helping them with the forensics investigation and recovery process. Lucore said they learned criminals got access to the town servers but at this point, no evidence shows they got any data with personal information.

Today employees returned to town hall, laptops in hand to be checked.

“The investigation is ongoing,” said Lucore. “They’ve been looking to see how the actor got in. As far as recovering, we’re basically building a new network.”

Clark Walton, a cyber security expert in Charlotte, said towns may have valuable information that hackers could use and that there’s a number of ways hackers could have broken in.

Preliminary information from the town said the bad actor accessed its system to create disruptions. Walton said this is called a “nuisance cyber attack,” although it’s still unclear if that was the hacker’s only goal.

“Bad guys will do that to gain notoriety and say, ‘you know, I hacked such and such. I hacked this hospital, I hacked this Twitter account.’ Whatever it may be, it’s certainly a possibility.”

The town said it will take a while for its IT department to rebuild the network. For now, people should be able to access town services as normal.

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