Hamilton County Sheriff's Office website restored after two-week cybersecurity incident
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The Hamilton County Sheriff's Office has restored its website after a cyber-ransomware attack forced the agency to take its online services offline for two weeks. The website, which had been inaccessible between April 14 and April 28, 2025, resumed operations on Monday. Some internal software systems remain offline but are expected to be fully operational later this week.
No details are disclosed about any data breached or impacted individuals.
The Sheriff's Office described the security breach as a "cyber-ransomware event". During the outage, visitors to the website encountered loading errors and timeout messages. The agency worked with an external cyber defense firm to investigate the incident and restore services
The two-week shutdown of the Sheriff's Office website caused several public services to be inaccessible:
- Public records request form
- Hamilton County Jail booking reports
- Mugshot database
- Warrant search functionality
- The tip line
During the outage, some users were able to obtain information by directly contacting the General Sessions Court clerks, though this alternative was not widely known to the public.
Update - as of 4th of May 2025, the Qilin ransomware group claimed responsibility for the breach of Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. According to threat intelligence monitoring, the group exfiltrated nearly 99GB of data allegedly from the www.hcsheriff.gov website. The exfiltrated data amounted to 128,294 files.
