11/21/17 – 5:18 A.M.

Putnam County is ready to handle a cyber attack. That’s according to county IT Director Joe Burkhart. He tells the Putnam County Sentinel he recently conducted mock attacks on the county’s data servers. In each case, he was able to isolate infected workstations, wipe the malicious code, and get them back up and running within minutes.

Burkhart says the county backs up data twice every 24 hours. That means the most the county could lose in a cyber attack is a few hours worth of data.

The county is making the efforts to avoid things like ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a virus that locks your information and will only unlock it after you pay a fee.