Following the completion of a thorough investigation, the City of Cranbrook is advising the public on the status of a malware occurrence that happened in the spring of 2018.

The city has experienced several malware incidents over the years. The latest occurrence was in March 2018 where several devices including workstations and servers were knocked offline. The RCMP was brought in to investigate, and the city’s information technology team conducted its own internal investigation.

The investigation found no evidence that any personal information was compromised. No money was paid.

The city had a robust backup system in place, and was therefore able to recover lost files. The largest impact to the organization was simply the downtime in assessing the occurrence and restoring the system.

Since this occurrence, the city has invested proactively into additional IT security and is positioning itself to be more resilient to any future threat. This will remain a priority for the city over the next several years as we ramp up our information technology infrastructure to improve our services to our customers.

It is important to recognize, however, that no matter how sophisticated the security systems are, constant due diligence will be required to combat ever more sophisticated security threats.

City of Cranbrook

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