'Unusual activity' detected, Butler County auditor website goes offline

Lauren Pack, Journal-News, Hamilton, Ohio
·2 min read

Apr. 17—A report of "unusual activity" detected by a third-party vendor for a property search tool has taken the Butler County Auditor's Office website offline, according to Auditor Nancy Nix.

Nix said the site has been down since Sunday after they were notified by Tyler Technologies the company that hosts the site.

On Wednesday, the site remained down with county IT and Tyler Technologies meeting to discuss the cause and how to fix it.

"We just had a conference call with Tyler and county IT," Nix told the Journal-News on Wednesday. "Tyler has assured us that there was no impact on our enterprise system. It was on a completely different server hosted in another area of the country, and there is no sign of attack or malicious activity, just some unusual activity (multiple repeating hits to the website), which caused them to take the website down."

Nix said they are hopeful the website would be back up Wednesday, noting Tyler Tech is patching and updating the site with enhanced protections.

The unusual activity was detected on in the public-facing property access hosting environment. and out of an "abundance caution" it was taken offline, Nix said per Tyler Technologies.

A "backdoor" workaround has been established until the website is restored.

Nix said to copy and paste the following link into your browser and not click on the link directly. https://propertysearch.butlercountyauditor.org/forms/htmlframe.aspx?mode=content/home.htm

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones has warned about the threat of cyber attacks.

His office previously was hit by an attack in 2020 when the dispatch center was crippled.

In February, Jones said the sheriff's office is "getting five cyber hack attempts a day by the Chinese, three times a day by the Iranians, and we got hacked two years ago by the Russians," Jones said. "And that is not just us. I assume they are doing that all over the country."

Jones has proposed a full-time department specializing in cyber security be formed at the state level.