Police Update On Town Website Hack In West Hartford

WEST HARTFORD, CT — The Town of West Hartford website is back online after being shut down for a day after officials discovered it had been hacked. Police say the site was taken down out of an “abundance of caution” and to preserve the system for law enforcement as the hack was investigated. The hack was discovered around 7:30 a.m. on Thursday and was immediately taken down by the town’s IT department.

“Once they were confident the patch was working, IT re-enabled public access to the site, which was back online in less than 24 hours,” Lt. Eric Rocheleau said in a Friday morning update. “Our website provider, Granicus, who specializes in government websites, was hit with an exploit virus, so communities as far away as Santa Barbara, CA were also impacted. Granicus worked on a patch to fix this vulnerability for all of their impacted customers, which was applied last night.

“Other than the inconvenience of this one website being down all day, there were no other known impacts; no sensitive data resides on this server, nor is it part of the Town's internal network.”

Rocheleau said all logs were sent to the CT Intelligence Center for further analysis since the hack impacted multiple government sites across the country and that investigation is ongoing.

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