When you read Carbon County Sheriff Dan Zeigler’s account of last August’s cyber attack on county computers, you’d think all of the county was in imminent danger of melting down.

But when you read county Administrator Eloise Ahner’s account, you’d think a simple restart of the computers was all that was needed to fix the problem.

We might never know exactly what happened, and how accurate Zeigler’s account is, because Ahner said last week that “At this point, I don’t think there is going to be (a report), since there wasn’t an actual demand or ransom. But it is being monitored and that will continue for a while to make sure that nothing happens.”

County Commissioner Wayne Nothstein, who was the chairman of the commissioners board last August, appears in no rush to have an in-depth investigation into the incident either.

He cited that the IT department was down three people and that the county assisted the outside agency that the county’s insurance company brought in to check every computer.

Zeigler said last week that “We really didn’t know what was affected. We came to find out that all our servers were affected and we could not access them.”

Zeigler said that he was never told what happened, and that the hack affected the operations of his department for months, including delaying sheriff’s sales of property.

It seems that the conflicting stories on the computer hack call out for an in-depth investigation by an outside agency and a detailed report so county officials and taxpayers know what happened and what will be done to prevent such an incident in the future.

Ahner also said, “The threat was there but nothing materialized. It was just a matter of getting everything back and that took some time. It took some time because those systems had to be shut down.”

That might be true, but it would probably put everyone’s mind at ease if an independent report came to the same conclusion.

The county commissioners - Rocky Ahner, Nothstein and newcomer Michael Sofranko, now the chairman of the commissioners board - should request a thorough review of the matter. It would certainly behoove Sofranko to push for it, setting a tone moving forward that county government takes these incidents extremely seriously.

The report should include what was the cause, if known, of the hack, who did it, what was affected and what will be the best practices going forward.

Trust in government, at all levels, is at a low-point in our country.

When government officials just off-handedly dismiss what appears to be a major disrupter in the daily operations of county government, that does not help build bridges with taxpayers and folks who work in county government.

Transparency. It’s a word we hear a lot these days, especially from politicians and government officials, who like to use the word but aren’t quite as good at practicing it.

This is one case where transparency is needed and a full report into the hacking incident calls out for the commissioners to demand one, make it available to the public and implement any changes that an expert might recommend.

Good or bad, a report can’t hurt, unless we’re not being told the full story.

Tom DeSchriver/tdeschriver@tnonline.com