A ransomware attack on a national email platform provider took down the town of New Whiteland’s email system late last week.
Rackspace Technology, one of the largest cloud and email hosting providers in the U.S., announced this week a ransomware attack caused a massive outage among millions of its customers starting early Dec. 2.
The town of New Whiteland was among those affected, as the town uses Rackspace to service its email systems, said Angela DeVoss, clerk-treasurer. Town officials and employees have not had access to their emails since as early as 3 a.m. Dec. 2, when they were first notified Rackspace was experiencing outages.
Rackspace has released few details on what, if any, information was taken, and would not disclose if the company paid a ransom, according to updates Rackspace has posted online for customers. Town officials do not know if any town information was compromised, DeVoss said.
Potentially accessed data on Rackspace’s servers could include archived email messages and contact lists, according to a report from Axios.
Rackspace suggested all its customers migrate emails to Microsoft 365 in the meantime. New Whiteland is working to migrate its emails and get their system working again by the end of the week.
It has taken longer than expected because Rackspace’s website kept crashing as the town IT manager worked on migrating their email platform, DeVoss said.
DeVoss also said she does not know if the town will be able to access emails sent to officials during the blackout period this week, as Rackspace has not provided information on that.
Anyone who needs to contact town officials should do so by phone at 317-535-9487. The office is open 7 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m.
