A cyberattack on Cott Systems, a public records company, has affected the 49 Vermont towns that use the company for their land records and blocked the public from seeing those records online.
The 49 Vermont towns that use Cott Systems for land records storage and management include Killington, Middlebury, Rutland and Stowe, according to the Vermont Municipal Clerks’ and Treasurers’ Association.
The company provides services such as scanning, digitization and microfilm for town and city records in more than 20 states, according to the Cott Systems website.
Land records detail transfer of ownership and details of properties in each town. Ready access to these records are crucial in the buying and selling of properties and in maintaining history and equity of information within towns across the state.
Other Cott customers in Vermont include Hardwick, Manchester, Montpelier, Newfane, Putney, Randolph, St. Albans City, Wilmington and Whitingham, according to the clerks association.
Mark Kirk, account executive at Cott Systems for Vermont, declined to comment on specifics of the situation, saying only that the company is focused on getting the outage “straightened out.”
Town clerks, who manage land records in Vermont, have been waiting for more than a week to return to the digital system, according to Stowe Town Clerk Lisa Walker. The system went down on Dec. 26, came up briefly in the middle of last week, then crashed again, she said.
Towns need to keep their records current, and many towns affected by the Cott outage have reverted to systems they used years ago for recording and managing land records.
“There’s certainly some lessons learned here, in terms of how to prepare if you’re completely shut down,” said Middlebury Town Clerk Ann Webster.
The paper documents in town clerks’ offices around the state have provided a safety net during the Cott outage, but the work involved has made clerks value the digital systems more than ever.
In Stowe, Walker is using the town’s physical records, but said the process is much more time-consuming than the digital system.
Middlebury has physical records as well, but if residents want to see them, they have to visit the town offices. “We don’t necessarily have the complete indexes here either,” said Webster, noting that tracking down records during the outage has been “hunt-and-peck” at times.
Killington Town Clerk Lucrecia Wonsor said she was told that Cott had notified the FBI and Homeland Security about the cyberattack, and is confident that the town’s records in the Cott system remain secure.
“They’re working feverishly to get it back up and running, as well as checking to make sure everything is intact,” Wonsor said.
Cott Systems has been updating town clerks at 6 every evening about the status of the outage, according to Walker, but towns have not been notified of any date they can expect the system to be running again.
For Webster, despite the outage’s inconvenience, it came at a relatively quiet time of year for land records in Middlebury. Real estate transfers slow down in winter, she said, before things pick up in the spring.
Land records are crucial for real estate agencies, and agents are referring to them “constantly,” said Pall Spera of Pall Spera Realtors in Stowe.
However, the company has not been hurt yet by the outage, he said. This is usually a busy time for real estate agents in Stowe, but lack of snow has slowed things down, which may allow for easier manual management of records, according to Spera.
