BELMONT COUNTY, Ohio – River News reported earlier Wednesday on the CodeRED emergency alert system being down for nearly a week. Belmont County 911 Director Brian Minder issued the following press release late Wednesday afternoon concerning the county CodeRed emergency alert system outage:
“We would like to inform you that the CodeRed notification system, which is used by Belmont County to alert residents to various emergency situations such as evacuation notices, utility outages, water main breaks, fires, floods, chemical spills, and other critical incidents, is currently unavailable. OnSolve, the company that provides the CodeRed system, notified us late last week of an ongoing security issue that has impacted system functionality. As of this today, the issue remains unresolved. In their latest update to clients, OnSolve confirmed that they are working to provide alternate login credentials for accessing the Crisis24 CodeRed system. We are currently awaiting these credentials and hope to receive them by the end of today. Once we have access to the alternate system, we will have limited functionality, including only having access to a national contact database of county residents. However, please note that this list will not include data from individuals who have previously manually registered for CodeRed alerts until the conversion of that data to the new system is completed. In the meantime, should any emergency arise that requires immediate public notification regarding life-threatening situations, we will promptly disseminate the necessary information through local media channels. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as OnSolve works to resolve the issue.
The following is the direct communication that we received from the company: “Our teams have been working round the clock, with external experts, to conduct a comprehensive review of the OnSolve CodeRED platform environment. We were the victim of a cybersecurity incident which was contained to but damaged the OnSolve CodeRED environment (which includes TelAlert Gateway and Smart Notice). We will continue to keep you updated with all relevant information. In an abundance of caution, we have decommissioned the OnSolve CodeRED platform and we will expedite our plan to move all customers to our new CodeRED by Crisis24 solution at no additional cost. This will provide you with access to alert and notification capabilities. We ask for your patience while our team diligently works to implement additional capabilities. We will work to promptly load your data into your CodeRED by Crisis24 account once your account is activated. Our Support team is available to assist you. We understand how frustrating this situation may be and sincerely regret the disruption caused.”
—Belmont County 911 Director Brian Minder
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