At its Committee of the Whole meeting Monday night, the Homer City Council discussed updates to the city’s cybersecurity situation.
Both the State of Alaska and several municipalities around the state have suffered cyber attacks in recent years, causing widespread havoc and costing untold dollars. City Manager Rob Dumouchel says the city needs to continue its investment in IT, and most importantly, IT security.
“It's like the digital infrastructure that makes it possible to run a city. So, you know, we need the staff, we need the equipment, we need to invest in cybersecurity. And this resolution is kind of a first step in just formally saying hey, like, you know we're, we support this, we're going to do it, we're going to move forward,” Dumouchel said.
Dave Berry is the city’s library director.
“Overall the City of Homer is, you know, in a reasonably decent, well protected stance. But we are not by any means invulnerable. So, we think we can improve,” Barry said.
Berry said the city’s IT staff had just met yesterday afternoon.
“About a two-hour meeting to go over specific actions that, that the department thinks we should be taking in the coming year. And it sort of roughed out a timeline of how to put that into effect. We do have a list of, sort of low-hanging fruit, that could be implemented very quickly and very easily and that would help increase our security a good deal right off the bat. After that, there's going to be a lot of, sort of, administrative back-end work and sort of human factors, modification, we need to do training with staff and things like that,” Barry said.
He said beyond those items, there are other, more advanced and expensive steps that can be taken to “harden” the city’s network against a cyber attack.
In response to a question about ransomware from Councilman Jason Davis, Berry said that is something that specifically worries him.
“Ransomware is the thing that keeps me up at night, more than anything else, because it's the one that has the highest profit margin for an attacker. So in, you know, in Matsu was mentioned earlier, and that was what got them. We, we do backups and we're, like I said, we had a security meeting this, just this afternoon to talk through how we want to strengthen our response to that kind of thing. So, I think we have a plan,” Barry said.
Councilwoman Caroline Venuti asked if the city needs more staff for its information technology, to which Dumouchel said yes.
“The same way as, you know, you add more, you add more pipe in the ground. You add more roads, you know, you add more graders, you add more staff and all that, and we should have been doing that with IT the whole time. So by my estimate, we should really be more like four to five people instead of two, and so, organizationally I brought the IT department of the library together that kind of gave a soft extra couple bodies, you know, on paper to help them. But this additional position, like network administrator type position will, they really help them achieve more of those goals, bringing in another person with higher level technical skills,” Dumouchel said.
Dumouchel said he will be bringing one new position in IT to the council for approval sometime this year.
