County IT reports rising workloads, blocked network traffic and recent ransomware attempt

An Iron County IT representative told the commission that the department completed 3,877 work orders in 2024 (about 320 per month) and is handling an average of roughly 290 work orders per month so far this year, with roughly 250 open tickets at the time of the report.

The IT director said the county’s network logged 8,875,290 blocked connections during a recent seven‑day window and that one attempted ransomware event was detected, quarantined and prevented from affecting county systems. "We caught that, quarantined it, and it never did affect our system," the IT director said.

The report noted ongoing cooperation with the State Information and Analysis Center (SIAC) and periodic outside security analyses; the director said outside consultants previously helped identify open ports and other vulnerabilities and that recent scans showed strong blocking performance compared with typical public-sector targets.

IT staff also outlined recent projects and updates: redesigns of the county website, the fair site and the sheriff’s site, development work for parcel and permitting applications for the road department and zoning office, and a May tax‑sale map. The director said increasing tariffs and parts costs have pushed per‑computer prices up roughly $200 and are putting upward pressure on replacement costs.

Commissioners and staff discussed the difficulty of detecting dormant ransomware payloads, the role of backups and the county’s use of outside incident responders when needed. The IT director said some nonresident users (for example, payments from overseas IPs) remain blocked to reduce attack surface despite occasional inconvenience for legitimate out‑of‑country users.