Officials in Bucks County announced Tuesday that the computer-aided emergency dispatch system, that had been crippled by a cyberattack nine days ago, has been brought back online.
In a statement, officials said that the system was restored Tuesday afternoon, "allowing emergency telecommunicators to use the automated system for the first time since Jan. 21 when a ransomware attack brought the system fully offline."
“We here at Emergency Services cannot say enough about the kindness, professionalism and patience our first responder community has extended to us during this outage – especially to our 911 dispatchers who have been working extra hard,” said Emergency Services Director Audrey Kenny said in a statement. “With some of the weight lifted from our dispatchers, we now look forward to working with our partner agencies to restore their full access to these critical tools as quickly and safely as we possibly can.”
The attack had been blamed on the ransomware group "Akira."
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While 9-1-1 services were never offline, while the computer-aided dispatch system was offline, officials said dispatchers "relied on backup systems to document and dispatch calls for service."
County officials said they will continue to monitor restored systems for threats or other technical issues while they "work toward full CAD restoration."
The county, officials said, has also restored connectivity to state and federal databases containing criminal justice information, like the databases for the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network and the National Crime Information Center.
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In a statement, Kenny said the county is working on building up network security.
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