The world of cybersecurity is dimmer now than ever before. Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On June 10, 2026, Spartanburg County government offices were breached by nameless and faceless cyber criminals.
It not only shut down the County’s information technology systems for 17 days, but since then has been the state’s best-kept open secret since 1973 Watergate.
Now, two months later, neither officials with the County nor investigators with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division have revealed any specifics on what was compromised, how many people could potentially be affected, what was stolen – if anything – and nothing on who the perpetrators might be and how they broke into the County’s systems.
“The County has not identified evidence that data was accessed, exfiltrated, or compromised,” said Spartanburg County communications manager Scottie Kay Blackwell in June. “The security review remains ongoing, and the County continues to work with outside experts to complete that process.”
The only thing clear at this point is a growing concern by both the public and County employees over the incident, especially since other breaches have occurred in the recent past without any progress toward a permanent solution.
“The County has been hacked three times in the last three years,” said County coroner Rusty Clevenger. “I had to take my information off their system, which County leaders approved, and put it into a cloud-based government system. We operate 24/7, and it would have made our job extremely hard to do and to serve the public had we not made this move.”
And Spartanburg resident Scott Turner indicated in a June 16 Facebook post that the incident is just another reason why his confidence in county-elected government can’t get much lower.
“Spartanburg County has been non-transparent during every phase of this debacle,” Turner said in the post. “They have not told the citizens anything except: ‘trust us to fix it.’ There needs to be a thorough investigation into these ongoing cybersecurity breaches and full transparency with the public about every part of it.”
https://www.facebook.com/groups/623777511109360/permalink/3475590999261316/
County systems were previously broken into in August 2025 when a data breach affected more than 9,700 residents; and again in April 2023 when a ransomware attack corrupted the County’s database, affecting more than 12,000 state residents, and resulting in a loss of 27 years’ worth of scanned images of decedents’ estates, guardianship/conservatorship files, and marriage applications and licenses.
https://www.spartanburgcounty.gov/DocumentCenter/View/101463/Ransomware-Memorandum?bidId=
AND
https://consumer.sc.gov/identity-theft-unit/security-breach-notices
But even with the disruptions, employee concern, and resident distrust of the IT systems and people who operate them to keep information safe from hackers, Spartanburg County is only a single cog in a national and worldwide effort to prevent cyber crime.
And so far, that effort, at best, is losing.
“The reality is that security is almost always playing catch-up regarding the latest threats and vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Noah Schiffman, a reformed hacker, former first chief technology advisor at KBR, Inc., in North Charleston, and now the co-owner of Secursion.ai, which helps companies strengthen their cyber defenses. “New exploits are discovered every day which can’t be predicted.”
For example, in 2025 alone, the number of cyber crimes reported to the FBI totaled just over 1 million – more than triple the number in 2015. Of this amount, 75 percent of the crimes or threats came from ransomware and data breaches.
https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
“Ransomware, the fastest growing type of cybercrime, is 35 years old, it shows no signs of slowing down,” said Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures and Editor-in-Chief at Cybercrime Magazine, a research and market intelligence firm with locations in Northport, N.Y., and Sausalito, Calif. “We predict ransomware will cost the world more than $20 billion per month in 2031, up from $20 billion per year in 2021.”
And in its 2025 Internet Crime Report, FBI officials said that losses from cyber fraud not only surpassed the $20 billion mark in just the last year, but are increasing along several fronts.
“Investment-related fraud was once again the largest component of these losses, followed by business email compromises and tech support scams,” said Jose Perez, operations director for the bureau’s criminal and cyber branch. “We received a few thousand complaints per month in our early days. We now average almost 3,000 complaints per day.”
These complaints are all-but-certain to keep rising, especially as business and personal losses mount.
In South Carolina alone, for instance, residents reported $264 million in losses in 2025 to the FBI, compared to $146 million in losses in 2024, a $118 million increase. Those 60 and older submitted the most complaints and suffered the most severe financial losses at $97.3 million.
Five recent incidents that demonstrate the risk include:
• Surfside Beach, S.C. sent $545,000 to a scammer impersonating a contractor.
• Laurens County, S.C., lost $1.6 million through a fraudulent invoice.
• Federal prosecutors indicted 12 people in a $25 million business-email-compromise scheme.
• Wall Street financial professionals were shaken this August from an attempted cyber attack on hedge fund investment firms, including Two Sigma Investments which currently manage $75 billion in assets.
• Officials with AnMed Medical Center Hospital in Anderson, S.C., recently discovered a cybersecurity disruption involving malware that forced the closure of dozens of clinics and imaging locations across its network.
State government agencies are also vulnerable to threats.
In 2012, the South Carolina Department of Revenue in Columbia was the victim of a mammoth phishing attack that affected 700,000 businesses and compromised the social security numbers and bank account numbers of 3.8 million individuals.
In the next four years, SCDOR implemented a number of security measures, including encryption, deployment of new hardware and software, employee training to recognize phishing emails, and organizational restructuring to give security measures more leverage.
“The threat environment has changed considerably since 2012,” said Brooke Bailey, director of strategic communications with the South Carolina Department of Administration. “No organization can guarantee that every cyber attack will be prevented.”
And now the threat environment has grown to include Artificial Intelligence.
Schiffman pointed out that beyond technology, questions about ethics, workforce transformation, privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, misinformation, and critical thinking are “increasingly becoming part of the discussion.”
“Those may ultimately prove to be just as important as the technology itself,” he said.
Consider a co-report this past April by the San Francisco-based software development firm Writer and Massachusetts research firm Workplace Intelligence.
In surveying 2,400 knowledge workers across the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, researchers with these companies found that 29% of employees admit to sabotaging their company's Artificial Intelligence strategy – 44% among Gen Z workers – because they are afraid that AI will eventually replace them in their job.
“I’ve seen this play out in practice and it’s already happening,” said Agata Kaczmarska, former enterprise AI lead with JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a LinkedIn post this past spring. “(Companies) can’t fully reassure employees that AI won’t impact their roles because in many cases, it will.”
All of which is ironic since the last two generations are now seeing firsthand the 1863 prediction by English writer Samuel Butler that humans would one day be replaced by automated systems.
https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1935_Butler_Press_CUL-DAR226.1.132a.pdf
But despite the warnings, as depicted in 1960s television shows such as Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone, how did the technology reach a point where machines and the cyber criminals on their side are edging closer to manipulating lives and telling us what to do?
Both Schiffman and Kaczmarska put it down to an effort to keep work and progress flowing at a normal pace while use of AI is outpacing authority.
“AI adoption is accelerating faster than governance maturity,” she said. “Not because companies are reckless, but because AI is becoming operationally necessary before organisations have fully worked out: what data can be used; where it can go; who owns the risk; what controls actually exist; or how usage should be monitored.”
And Schiffman noted that playing catch-up in this area of cybersecurity is a luxury that all of the state’s IT systems – and the people who run them – can’t afford without risking far more serious breaches to places like AnMed, SCDOR, and Spartanburg County.
But doing so means humans putting themselves in the place of sophisticated computer systems, and the criminals who know how to manipulate them. Which means many more of us will likely have to become like them with no guarantee of beating them.
“The weakest links in a computer chain are the end users, and security professionals have to think like them in order to give better protection,” Schiffman said. “AI simply raises the pace – and the stakes.”
Next Week: Cyber Origins, Early Breaches, and the need for more protection
