Ohio Auditor's Office Hit by Cyberattack; Website Offline as Local Governments Watch for Fallout

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COLUMBUS, Ohio: A cyberattack on the Ohio Auditor of State’s office has knocked the agency’s website and online accounts offline, and Auditor Keith Faber says overseas cybercriminals, and possibly foreign state actors, were behind it.

The attack happened on Sunday, October 25. In a statement released Tuesday, Faber said the office detected the threat and quarantined it right away, then took its web server and online accounts offline. State and federal law enforcement are investigating.

Faber said the attack was not a ransomware attack, but he did not specify what kind of attack it was. He said the office lost no data because its files are backed up, and it does not believe the financial information of Ohioans, or of the governments the office audits, is at risk. The data was not on the office’s web server, he said, and payments run through a separate state portal. Even so, Faber warned that governments doing business with the office may run into problems with online payments, and the office is building a temporary web platform and asking for patience until the permanent server is back online.

“On a near-daily basis, we see reports of private and public entities targeted by criminals,” Faber said. “The measure of an office is not whether it is subject to such an attack but rather how it responds to these very common threats.”

The office audits more than 5,900 state and local government agencies, including county offices, cities, villages, townships and school districts across Ross, Pickaway, Pike, Scioto, Gallia, Vinton, Jackson, Highland, Adams and Franklin counties. The public audit report search lives on the office website, so while the site is down, residents cannot pull up finished audits of their local governments. The office’s fraud hotline, 866-FRAUD-OH (866-372-8364), remains the reporting route that does not depend on the website.

The office also runs the Uniform Accounting Network, known as UAN, the bookkeeping software used by more than 2,000 Ohio cities, townships, villages, public libraries and special districts to keep their books and run payroll. Faber’s statement did not mention UAN, and no public statement from the office had addressed the network by Tuesday afternoon. The UAN support site, UANLink, was still up on Tuesday with no attack notice posted on its front page.

The Auditor’s office is also the agency charged with checking whether Ohio’s local governments and schools have adopted the cybersecurity programs that state law now requires.

It is not the first major Ohio government hack. In 2024, a ransomware attack on the City of Columbus exposed personal information belonging to hundreds of thousands of people.

The Auditor of State’s website remained offline on Tuesday afternoon. This is a developing story, and we will update it as more information becomes available.

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