Recorder of Deeds office nearly caught up after network hack Aug 2023
Published on August 29, 2023
DOVER — After weeks of disruption, the Kent County recorder of deeds office is nearly caught up in its duties of documenting deeds, liens and mortgage satisfactions with single-day turnarounds.
Following a Kent County Levy Court network intrusion July 8, recorder operations were shuttered until Aug. 3, when the office began once again to process paper requests. Same-day paper service returned Aug. 18.
The return of electronic document processing was back up and running Aug. 7, and Recorder of Deeds Eugenia Thornton said Monday that same-day digital service is only a day or two behind.
Kent’s network was fully restored about 10 days ago, but no determination has been made on the source of the intrusion, county information technology director Joe Simmons said last week.
Meanwhile, the recorder of deeds office has processed a combined 2,665 paper and electronic documents since Aug. 7, Ms. Thornton said.
She went on to laud the work of her four clerks, especially because they were greeting a concerned citizenry. Between July 10 and Aug. 3, her office received a higher-than-usual number of walk-in customers.
“Some heard of the network problem and were concerned about their recorded documents’ safety,” she said. “Some could not get the county network to work from home. Those people drove to our office and walked past three handwritten signs advising that the network was down, (only) to discover, to their dismay, that we could not get it to work either.
“Bewildered, they pointed to our blank monitors and asked why we could not access their data. Luckily, we had prepared fact sheets and postcards to hand them, so they could do from home what we could not do in our office.”
She added that residents could utilize uslandrecords.com to reassure themselves that their deeds were safe and to research property history.
“If we had not had US Land Records up and running, many in the real estate industry would not have been able to do their jobs,” Ms. Thornton said. “The fact that we had postcards and fact sheets to hand out to people, teaching them how to look up the records themselves when we could not do it for them, was also a significant factor in keeping the citizens informed and reassured.
“Lawyers, title searchers, septic system designers and surveyors could continue doing most of their work, even though the Kent County Property Records System was down.”
Ms. Thornton said the network intrusion was a reminder that there are individuals out there who want to harm others via the internet.
“Per the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, cybercrimes and identity theft cannot be prevented, though risks can be minimized. Being notified fast is the best hope of reducing damage,” she said.
Regardless, she added, “we rely on information technology to do our jobs. It is shocking when we can’t access the network, can’t talk on the phone, can’t email, can’t scan or copy. Every day, we were frustrated by the simplest of tasks we once took for granted that were no longer possible.”
Ms. Thornton said more than 200 people signed up for the office’s new property transaction alert program, pfa.uslandrecords.com, during the shutdown’s first week.
The real estate community reacted to the problem, as well, she said, noting the response to federal interest rates rising as high as 2.5% July 28.
“The Delaware lending community had foreseen this and offered title gap insurance,” she said. “The deeds updates on July 21 and 26 mentioned this and outlined procedures for pulling documents before we recorded them, if interest rates affected the sale.”
The recorder of deeds summed up the intrusion situation this way: “July and August were challenging times for the Kent County recorder of deeds but, due to our clerks’ work ethics, our printed ‘how to’ fact sheets and postcards, our major stakeholders’ forbearance and restraint, and IT director Joe Simmons’ vision for a quick fix and an IT team talented enough to execute it, ... deeds are back to normal.”