Key services at more than two dozen libraries in Contra Costa County are working again after they were shuttered by a network outage last week, library officials said this weekend.
The outage was the result of ongoing work to secure the Contra Costa County Library network, which was the target of a Jan. 3 cyber attack.
“We know this recovery has been frustrating,” said County Librarian Melinda Cervantes. “We appreciate how understanding everyone has been and want to reassure library users that we have made restoring services to the public the first priority.”
Internet, WiFi and online account access are up and running along with some digital resources at the 26 libraries affected by the outage.
Library services like Link+ and some of the other online resources and databases will take a little longer to be restored, officials said.
The library will update ccclib.org as additional services are restored.
This was a malware breach that was not disclosed to the public.
This happened earlier in the year and it was described in previous postings to Claycord.
It was not only disclosed on Claycord, the library sent several emails regarding the attack to library card holders.
I’m pretty sure @94519 is wrong about it being a malware breach that was not disclosed to the public. Starting on Saturday the library system’s IT staff was implementing a system wide network lockdown plus they switched the main card catalog’s user interface from one vendor to another. The network lockdown was prompted by January’s malware breach that was disclosed and handled. I believe the vendor switch was already planned as they had switched many systems to the new vendor last year and but had not yet switched the catalog and a few other pieces such as Link+ to the new vendor.
Both the lockdown and catalog projects seemed to run into issues that spilled over into the week.