COLUMBUS, Ohio — More than a month after the City of Columbus fell victim to a cyber attack, it’s still unclear how many people had their personal information stolen.

What You Need To Know

  • There’s still uncertainty when it comes to how many people actually had their information stolen

  • Columbus began offering free credit monitoring to its employees, later extending that offer to its residents and anyone who’s shared their information with the city or its municipal courts

  • To date, Mayor Andrew Ginther shared that nearly 10,000 people have signed up for the free credit monitoring

While the city is offering free credit monitoring to anyone who may be a victim, the numbers show only a small percentage of those people are taking advantage of it.

It’s been almost six weeks since the ransomware group Rhysida claimed it stole data from the City of Columbus before leaking some of it on the dark web.

Since then, multiple police officers from the city have claimed their bank accounts were compromised, while the city has become the subject of two class action lawsuits.

But there’s still uncertainty when it comes to how many people actually had their information stolen.

“You gotta automatically assume your whole system's been compromised,” said Israel Arroyo, founder of Stealth Entry Cyber Security Solutions.

Weeks after the incident, the city began offering free credit monitoring to its employees, later extending that offer to its residents and anyone who’s shared their information with the city or its municipal courts.

Arroyo said municipalities and companies can run into trouble when they don’t separate their employees data from civilians.

“Most organizations don’t understand or know how to separate the data because they just look at it as, ‘hey, let’s just put the data all in one spot,’ when in actuality, that can be pretty dangerous,” said Arroyo.

Arroyo said anyone who has given their information to a police officer, gotten a parking ticket or paid city utilities or taxes could have had their data compromised.

To date, Mayor Andrew Ginther shared that nearly 10,000 people have signed up for the free credit monitoring.

But that’s only a tiny fraction of  the number of the people who could be victims.

The city’s population is just under a million, with likely hundreds of thousands of others who either work there or who have another connection to the city.

And Arroyo said it’s not just adults who are at risk.

“Kids are also subject to identity theft and a lot of people don’t realize that some of services will actually take your children’s information, their PII, their social security number, etcetera and add it to their monitoring system,” said Arroyo.