A ransomware attack that crippled the city of Wichita’s network for more than a month starting in May was limited to a Wichita Police Department records system, city officials said Wednesday. That means the Russian hacker group — LockBit — that claimed credit for the attack did not access bank card numbers, social security numbers or other private information about city customers or residents — unless the Police Department kept those records as part of an investigation. The breached records include potentially sensitive information about witnesses, victims and suspects in 77,000 police cases. They included incident reports, arrest reports, supplemental reports, property reports, accident reports and traffic citations, City Manager Robert Layton said. Layton, who has previously avoided disclosing key details about the cyber attack, said on Wednesday that the city’s internal investigation is now considered closed, so he can provide more information to the public. “We haven’t really been able to get out the information on the data itself, and I think that was one of the most important things we wanted to talk about, to kind of ease people’s concerns about their water bill information, for instance, and payment information, that type of thing,” Layton said.
Source: Local News | Wichita Eagle

Where people in Kansas are moving to most. Fewer Americans moved in 2022, according to the latest Census data, but of those who did, 1 in 5 moved to a different state. Population growth has returned to pre-pandemic norms; Southern states continued to record influxes in population, while the Northeast saw the biggest drops, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. These trends largely continued into last year, according to United Van Lines’ annual movers study. States with the most outbound moves in 2023 were New Jersey, Illinois, and North Dakota, which moved up 15 spots from the year before. Stacker compiled a list of states people from Kansas are moving to the most using data from the Census Bureau. States are ranked by the number of people who moved from Kansas to a different state in 2022. By now, the headlines are likely familiar: The “most unusual job market in modern American history.” The “Great American Labor Shortage.” The massive disruption to the job market wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, when by the latter half of 2021 almost half of American companies were reporting a worker shortage, impacted every corner of the nation. Since then, however, the job market has shifted back to more typical levels of employment, giving many Americans a renewed sense of normalcy. But some industries and parts of the country are still hurting for workers—a trend with ongoing ramifications for consumers and workers alike. JobTest.org analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Chamber of Commerce to illustrate the current state of Kansas’ ongoing labor shortage based on a national analysis. The analysis uses the most recent data available at the national and state levels, from July and June 2024 respectively. According to government jobs data, there were 8.2 million open jobs in the U.S. in July and only 7.1 million unemployed workers. Even if every unemployed worker had a job, the nation would still have millions of unfilled positions.
Source: Local News | Wichita Eagle