COLUMBUS, Ohio — It’s been more than a week since the City of Columbus announced a cybersecurity incident forced it to shut down some IT services.
While the city works on repairs, there are many groups, including See Brilliance, that are seeking answers.
What you need to know: City of Columbus says cybersecurity incident forces it to shut down some IT services
While the city works to restore service, many groups, including See Brilliance, are looking for answers.
See Brilliance is a nonprofit organization that provides educational experiences using STEAM skills to youth and their families.
See Brilliance is a nonprofit organization that provides educational experiences to youth and their families using STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) skills.
Nathan Harris said this was all made possible thanks to a grant from the city of Columbus.
“We receive a total of $70,000 to do summer work,” he said.
Harris said some grant funding has already been received, but a second round of grant money has yet to come in due to the cybersecurity incident that hit the city last week, putting pressure on the city to find other sources of revenue.
“We’ve made sure to reach out with donations to ensure that programs that are already committed to are not affected or further delayed because we don’t want to stop the fun for kids,” Harris said.
But Sea Brilliance isn’t the only one affected: earlier this week the police department announced its online records portal had stopped working, forcing residents to call a non-emergency number to file a police report.
Brian Steele of the Brotherhood of Police said in a statement, “We are confident this issue will be resolved quickly and will not impact community services. Cyber attacks are an attack on all of us, and we will work with the city to ensure this never happens again.”
But Harris is hopeful that everything will be fully restored soon.
“I’m very hopeful for the future,” he said, “and I hope this serves as a learning opportunity for all city governments and so on, so that better precautions can be taken and something like this never happens again.”
Harris also said he was concerned that payroll could be delayed if the situation was not resolved quickly. City officials, however, said the incident occurred last Thursday and was separate from the global IT outage.
