The Kent County Levy Court website is back up and running.
Kent County Levy Court was the victim of a hostile network intrusion on July 8th, forcing it to take numerous services offline temporarily.
While the county’s networks and systems were repaired and restored, there was no disruption of critical services like 911 Emergency Dispatch, and the county continuously added services to a temporary landing page.
This included a temporary online GIS map, a search tool for Kent County deed records, the ability to apply for a permit and submit property maintenance complaints, and committee meeting minutes.
Kent County Levy Court IT Director Joe Simmons says the website was really only impacted on the front end.
“Not all of our systems were impacted at the County,” explained Simmons. “Our finance system was on a different architecture, so that was never really impacted. So we could always cut checks and pay bills. So what we did was we just put up a new website to point to our financial systems, and that was pretty much back online in a short order.”
The attack came as the county was in the process of modernizing its web services and changing its domain name.
“Basically what it did is it just expedited the process of us updating and modernizing some of our systems,” said Simmons. “We still have some systems that we need to modernize, but for the most part, within a 30-day period, we basically built a new network that's going to be more resilient and more secure.”
The new website won’t be up for another few months, but residents can reach all necessary services at KentCountyDE.gov.
The network intrusion is still under investigation by state and federal law enforcement.
