‘Suspicious activity’ disrupts computer system in Douglas County Sheriff’s Office; some features now unavailable to public

photo by: Screen shot of Douglas County sheriff's website

A screenshot of the Douglas County sheriff's website contains a message to the public that "All services are offline until further notice."

The jail booking log and other features of the Douglas County sheriff’s website have been offline for days, and the sheriff’s office on Friday acknowledged that it had identified “suspicious activity on certain computer systems” that had caused issues with its system.

The office had previously said only that “technical issues” were causing the disruption and declined to confirm or deny whether a hacking incident had occurred. On Friday afternoon, though, sheriff’s office spokesman George Diepenbrock said that an investigation was underway.

“Upon becoming aware of the activity and following protocol, an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the activity has been launched,” he told the Journal-World.

He said that the office was “working to identify the source of this activity and to confirm its impact on our systems.”

He also indicated that the sheriff’s office is the only Douglas County system that “appears to have experienced suspicious activity at this time.”

Diepenbrock said that intermittent outages for certain systems could occur during the investigation, but he added that regarding public safety, all services are fully functioning.

“Anyone experiencing an emergency should call 911 because there is no disruption in 911 services or the Sheriff’s Office response,” he said. “All other county systems remain functional.”

Suspicious activity on a government computer system is not new. Three years ago, affiliates of a Russian-based ransomware group infiltrated the Kansas court system, creating havoc with the portals that gave the public free access to court records and that allowed online filings. That incident, initially described only as a “security incident,” occurred in October 2023 and took many months to repair.

The sheriff’s office gave no indication that ransomware was suspected in the current computer system malfunction.