Bucks County, Pennsylvania loses emergency dispatch system in ransomware attack

Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a jurisdiction of roughly 650,000 people north of Philadelphia, lost its computer-aided dispatch system to a cyberattack that began on Sunday, January 21, 2024. The county alerted the public the following night.

The CAD system supports about 130 fire, police and emergency medical agencies, and its loss forced dispatchers to log and route calls with pen and paper. Officials stressed that 911 phone lines and first responder radios stayed up. Officers, however, lost the in-vehicle terminals that connect to the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network and the National Crime Information Center. Scheduled court proceedings were postponed and the Pennsylvania National Guard was brought in to assist, according to The Record.

County officials initially declined to characterize the incident, though reporting pointed to a ransomware-type attack. Insurance Journal later reported that the Akira ransomware group was suspected. Bucks County refused to negotiate with the attackers and paid no ransom, rebuilding from backups instead. Dispatchers were back on the CAD system on January 30, nine days after the outage began.

The county subsequently approved several hundred thousand dollars for cybersecurity, forensic remediation and eDiscovery work, including about $375,000 for one incident response firm. Forensic work found no evidence that data had been copied or otherwise extracted from the CAD system, and the incident remained under county, state and federal investigation.