West Chester CISO reports jail camera outage, large political email attack in quarterly IT briefing

The borough’s chief information security officer (CISO) told the ACT Committee on Jan. 7 that the IT department’s quarterly report (covering October through December 2024) documented an unusual volume of unscheduled incidents and ongoing cybersecurity work.

The CISO said an early-morning equipment failure on Dec. 15 knocked out cameras in the borough holding cells after one domain controller failed; staff paused one controller to restore service and later identified a faulty integrated lights-out interface (iLO) on a host server. The outage left officers without camera views of some cells for about two hours before systems were restored and repaired the following Monday.

The CISO also reported a sustained political-volume email attack that began Dec. 18 and continued intermittently through Dec.…