CENTRE — Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver last week said his department's website is back online after a months-long hiatus.

Shaver said the website was one of dozens that had its security compromised after the servers at Brooks-Jeffery Marketing in Arkansas, which hosts the department's site, was hacked in June.

After adding some additional security features, Brooks-Jeffery now has begun the process of recreating websites for their customers, including the sheriff's department.

“Our general roster is back on the website and they have gone back and rebuilt the entire site,” Shaver said. “Several of their sites related to government, law enforcement or the financing were hacked.”

Shaver said the decision was made to pull the sites out of an abundance of caution.

“Before any threat of information getting released they just took all of them off,” he said. “They rebuilt them all on a more secure server.”

Shaver said not having the site online became an inconvenience for the sheriff's department.

“I had no idea how many people actually looked at that website and particularly at the jail roster,” Shaver said. “Everywhere I went people approached me asking, 'Where did it go?'.”

Shaver said the down time gave him the chance to add upgrades to the site.

“Actually, I have written an update and it will have additional features to the site in the future that they are still working on,” he said. “Soon we will have e-mail alerts and some other improvements to the administrative side.”