Other municipalities on high alert in wake of Hamilton cyberattack [Video]

The City of Hamilton is still dealing with a serious ransomware attack that’s caused a more than week-long disruption to some services.

They say they don’t believe any personal information was accessed by the hackers, but there’s still no indication of how long it could take to fully restore services.

And other municipalities are now on alert.

Experts say these attacks are not easy to avoid or deal with, and high level meetings are taking place behind closed doors to try to deal with these attacks.

The City of Hamilton is not the only government entity facing a cyberattack.

On Tuesday, Canada’s financial intelligence agency says it has also been hit.

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada–known as FINTRAC– say they don’t believe classified systems have been compromised.

According to Humber College Associate Dean of Information Communications Technology, Francis Syms, these types of attacks are practically inevitable.

“Over 90 per cent of the time it starts with someone clicking on an email,” Syms said.

He says changes in cybersecurity policies at municipalities are already happening.

“What cities and municipalities are doing now, is they are limiting access to records, maybe only the records that need to be used in the last year or two,” Syms said.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the National Cyber Security Centre provide best practices and toolkits to help.

CHCH News reached out to several municipalities who did not want to reveal what they are doing to protect themselves, citing security issues.

But, the Town of Lincoln confirmed that last month their security filter prevented over 22,000 spam and phishing attempts.

“The town of Lincoln takes cyber security very seriously and have implemented procedures and safeguards to help protect our operations and our citizens. These procedures and safeguards are continuously reviewed and updated as required to respond to any issues,” the town said in a statement.

McMaster University Software Engineering Professor and Cybersecurity Researcher Ridha Khedri said keeping up with hackers is time consuming and costly.

“There is a cost for security, and sometimes it’s not easy to justify that to taxpayers especially for the City of Hamilton, it’s not easy to justify spending millions of dollars in putting the right policy and training for security,” Khedri said.

The cyber security experts also say that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, we could also see attacks more often and everyone is warned to be careful what you click on.