City of Woodstock Still Reeling From Apparent Cyber Attack

Thursday, 26 September 2019 14:44

It could be at least another week until the City of Woodstock fully recovers from an apparent Cyber Attack. No ransom demands have been made at this time and the investigation is ongoing.

WOODSTOCK - It will likely be at least another week before the City of Woodstock fully recovers from an apparent Cyber Attack.

CAO David Creery says the City is still working on the cyber security incident that has impacted their information systems.

"We are working diligently towards bringing all of our services back online as soon as possibly. The city will continue to minimize the risk of any unauthorized access to the information on our systems and we are keeping our systems offline until we are completely confident that our system is safe and we have completed our investigation."

The City does apologize to residents for any inconvenience this is causing. The City has not found any evidence of unauthorized access to sensitive information, either accessed or transferal. The investigation is ongoing and they will provide updates as they are available. Creery says they have not received any kind of ransom request at this time.

"We have not received a ransom, we have not made inquiries, directly or indirectly through an agent. We have not been contacted by anyone making demands for a ransom. We continue to work through the recovery efforts and are building a new trusted network."

Creery says it could be awhile before things are completely back to normal.

"We are currently working through a recovery plan and we are making progress in that regard. It is very systematic work and it will take some time to bring our systems back online. We are hopeful, that, certainly as we work through the weekend and into the early part of next week, that we will have a better estimate as to when we can bring our systems back to normal. We are working on hopefully, bringing forward a partial recovery and hopefully that will be early next week, but we do expect that a full system recovery, could take as long as another week."

All City services are still running in as normal as fashion as possible. That includes transit, fire, police, they all continue uninterrupted. The biggest impact is the inability for residents to send emails to the City and for City staff to send emails as well as access their computer network.