You may have received emails this week that were a part of a
phishing attack. Your IT department responded promptly to neutralize this threat and prevented significant business impacts. These attacks are becoming more and more common.
DataInsider defines Phishing as "a form of social engineering that uses email or malicious websites (among other channels) to solicit personal information from an individual or company by posing as a trustworthy organization or entity."
Municipalities all over the world are routinely attacked. In March 2018, the City of Atlanta was hit with a damaging virus that held the City of Atlanta computers hostage for a fee of $51,000 in Bitcoin. Atlanta refused to pay the ransom. It could cost Atlanta up to $17 million to correct the situation.
We ask all employees to be vigilant with every single email, online communication, and website interaction. These threats can be buried inside of pictures, emails, websites, PDF’s, and Word documents. When viewing email, make sure that you recognize the sender and that the sender’s email address or URL is genuine. Hackers create addresses that look or sound legitimate. Hover over the URL to check legitimacy.
It is critical that you understand specifically what to look for in a potential cyber threat.
Here is a screenshot of the actual email created by the hacker who attacked the City’s computers (we removed the name of the employee whose email account was hacked):
Cybersecurity is a significant threat to every governmental agency across the nation. Every single day we have to defend the entire network including our external cloud services from a never-ending stream of external parties who probe our system for weaknesses.
Following Monday’s events, the IT Department wants to thank everyone who reached out right away and knew something was off. Your vigilance helped prevent a larger impact to the City.
At any time, if you notice something suspicious with email or any online interaction, please contact the IT Security Team at
[email protected].