City of Shoreline back online after resolving technical issues - fully operational by Monday morning

Everything is where it should be.
Photo by Victor Barrios on unsplash.com

Shoreline City staff, working diligently with outside consultants, have been able to resolve the network issues and are slowly bringing all our systems back online. We anticipate being fully operational by Monday morning.

The City’s email and phone systems are back up and working.

Most of our other systems that rely on the network are also back online, including our online permitting system. We anticipate all systems being fully operational by Monday morning.

We appreciate the community’s patience as we work to fully resolve this issue.

What happened

On Wednesday, October 27, 2021 IT staff noticed a high level of unusual external traffic to our network that appeared to be an attack of some kind. Out of an abundance of caution we elected to sever our internet connection and bring our systems down in a controlled manner. Our security and network consultants confirmed that this was a prudent step to take to protect the City’s data and network.

We worked with our security consultants to review our logs for any suspicious activity. These logs are extensive and from various sources, so it took time to thoroughly review them all. While reviewing this information, City staff worked to ensure the City could continue to communicate with residents and provide services as much as possible and make plans for continuity and recovery.

The good news is that after extensive review, our IT staff and security consultants feel confident that our network wasn’t breached, we didn’t lose any data, private information was not exposed, and there is no cryptoware on the network. 

We greatly appreciate the hard work of our IT staff and other City staff who quickly responded to ensure our network and data remained secure and that we could continue to address the community’s needs.