On December 5, the Albemarle County Finance Department reported detection of probable security compromises on five individual Greenshades (online portal for employee paystubs, HR documents, and more) accounts. Please read the following updates from Finance, in order from newest to oldest:

December 7 Update

The affected employees have been contacted. If you did not receive an email indicating your account was among the few that were identified as being impacted, you don’t need to do anything further regarding this matter. If we discover others we will notify you accordingly.

We appreciate your patience as we further investigate this incident. Should you have any questions or concerns regarding this matter and/or the protections available to you, please do not hesitate to contact us at FSBPHelp@albemarle.org.

We continue to recommend that you remain aware and take precautionary steps:

1. Enable two-part authentication for your Greenshades account–if you are not sure how to do this please contact Financial Systems/Business Processes division at FSBPHelp@albemarle.org.
2. In your Greenshades account under the Account Settings tab (upper right of the screen) there is a tab My Account, where you can find a list of attempts to access your account–monitor these for login attempts that you do not recognize or remember attempting.
3. Passwords–they can always be stronger than the minimum requirements and can be changed more frequently than required.

December 6 Update

What we are doing to protect your information:

Please be assured that we have taken every step necessary to address the incident, and that we are committed to fully protecting all of the information that you have entrusted to us. Greenshades was taken offline to ensure the safety of your accounts. We will make the Greenshades portal accessible again at noon today, Wednesday December 6. We are currently working with cybersecurity experts and other professionals to ensure the continued security of your information.

What you can do to protect your information:

There are additional actions you can consider taking to reduce the chances of identity theft or fraud on your account(s). We suggest you use dual factor authentication to further protect your information. The attached document details how to establish dual factor authentication for your account and it is relatively simple to do. If you are not sure how to do this, please contact Financial Systems/Business Processes division at FSBPHelp@albemarle.org and we will respond within 24 hours to your request for assistance. We highly recommend taking advantage of the added security that dual factor authentication provides.

We have also changed all employee passwords, which is another protective measure. You will be required to change your password on your next login to Greenshades.

We sincerely apologize for this incident, regret any inconvenience it may cause you, and encourage you to take advantage of the dual authentication outlined herein. Should you have any questions or concerns regarding this matter please do not hesitate to contact us at FSBPHelp@albemarle.org.