A cyberattack on Mississippi web hosting company U.S.NEXT has disrupted county websites, email and high school sports paperwork since last week, with no restoration estimate Monday.
U.S.NEXT operates the computer servers that deliver customers’ websites and email. In a Monday update, it warned that previously sent emails likely would not arrive and advised customers to ask senders to resend them after service returns.
The company suggested switching email providers. For customers whose email routing it manages, U.S.NEXT offered to redirect incoming messages to the new service.
The disruption has delayed preparations for high school all-star games, WAPT reported Monday. Mississippi Association of Coaches Executive Director Johnny Mims said the group’s website stopped working Thursday, preventing players and coaches from using online forms and links for participation paperwork.
“We’re kind of, you know, in limbo right now,” Mims told WAPT.
Madison County’s website outage interrupted access to meeting materials, land information and Justice Court fine payments, County Administrator Greg Higginbotham told WLBT. WLBT later reported restored access to land records, online ticket payments and sheriff’s department contact information.
The Jackson-based company hosts Madison County and 68 other Mississippi government websites, WAPT reported. The station identified Warren, Hinds and Clarke counties among those affected.
Hinds County directed residents to an alternative website for taxes and vehicle tags, WAPT reported Monday. The tax collector’s office remained open for in-person transactions. Supervisor Tony Smith said the county’s own servers were not directly targeted.
Smith described residents’ frustration: “it’s frustrating to the people, and when they are hurting and can’t do something, I get a lot of calls.”
Warren County put up a temporary page directing residents to telephone numbers and county offices, The Vicksburg Post reported Monday. IT Director Ray Charles Burns said the outage began around the middle of last week, possibly Wednesday. “The only response I got back from them is an automated bounce email,” he said of his attempts to contact U.S.NEXT.
An Iowa business also reported losing its website and email. Dennis Fett, proprietor of the Peacock Information Center near Minden, wrote in a public software forum that peafowl.com and its associated email had been down since Thursday. He was still awaiting recovery Sunday.
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U.S.NEXT first reported a network outage Friday morning. Later that day, it said a cyberattack had disrupted websites and email, that it had restricted access while assessing risks, and that it was working with FBI and Homeland Security teams.
U.S.NEXT said Sunday that government payment tools operated on third-party systems, its database server was unaffected and website administrator passwords were encrypted. It said customer accounting information was stored in unaffected cloud services.
The company also said no personal client account information, including billing details, had been compromised. It has not said whether hosted website content or email data was accessed. It has not identified the attack method or an attacker.
