A cyberattack on Murray County’s computer network has hobbled police reporting and dispatch services in Chatsworth, pushing officers back to pen, paper and workaround spreadsheets instead of their usual software. County leaders and law enforcement say the outage is slowing routine tasks like accident reports, vehicle checks and payments, and residents are waiting longer for records while IT teams work to rebuild affected systems.
Police Go Old-School After Servers Go Dark
Chatsworth police say incident reports, accident reports and the department's computer-aided dispatch all run on county servers that were disconnected after the attack. With those systems offline, officers are filing handwritten reports and tracking calls with spreadsheets and fillable PDFs. “We have kind of gone back to the 80s,” Eton Police Chief Todd Pasley said. Murray County Commissioner Noah Bishop added that “we can see the light at the end of the tunnel” as staff work on recovery, according to The Daily Tribune.
County Offices, Payroll and Taxes Hit Slow Lane
To contain the incident, officials disconnected county servers and temporarily closed or limited access to several key functions, including the Tax Commissioner's office, Tax Assessor, Probate Court and Juvenile Court. The outage has also affected payroll, tax processing and other administrative systems. County staff say some services have been brought back on clean machines that are isolated from the main network, according to DysruptionHub.
State Troopers Step In To Keep Crashes Moving
The Georgia State Patrol has been helping with crash investigations so drivers can still get accident reports for insurance purposes. Officers are also able to verify vehicle registrations through the Georgia Department of Revenue website, although they say the process is slower without their usual systems. Federal agents are involved in the probe into the county network outage, and Chatsworth police report that video-evidence servers were initially affected but no footage was lost, according to The Daily Tribune.
Local Mess, National Trend
Industry trackers and cybersecurity researchers say small county governments have been frequent ransomware targets this spring, and Murray County’s outage shows how hard operations can be hit when shared servers go down. The event is listed on national incident trackers and appears in industry reporting about a particularly busy month of ransomware activity, according to ransomware.live.
What Residents Should Expect Next
Officials warn that records and payments will take longer to process while teams rebuild systems and run manual workarounds. Residents with pending business are being urged to call county offices before visiting in person. County spokespeople say IT staff and outside specialists are working to restore normal operations, with limited services returning as infrastructure is gradually rebuilt, as noted by DysruptionHub.
