Mayor Copeland reflects on cyber attack, but tight on details

Mayor Craig Copeland in 2022. 

It’s been one month since the City of Cold Lake found themselves the victims of a cyber attack, and Mayor Craig Copeland is remaining tight-lipped about the nature of the incident in order to protect their information.

The July 23rd incident saw the City shut down their servers to avert larger problems, leading to old school methods of cash or cheque only for purchases, and the phonelines being unusable.

The municipality said the threat originated from Russia using ransomware and viruses, “encrypting and damaging files and back-ups across multiple servers.”

The City said personal information was not taken, and although some information was seen, “they didn’t get to see a lot.”

“Nothing’s lost. The question is, they’ve seen stuff, but really, in the end, what did they see,” said Mayor Craig Copeland on The Morning After.

“The staff are still going through all of that. We have an idea what they got to see. Then we’ll contact any individuals that we think may have be any concerns. But it could have been a lot worse than it was. Luckily, we have steps in place that the staff had set up so that it wasn’t that bad, but it took everything down.”

Vital infrastructure such as the water treatment plant and wastewater are on different servers, so this attack did not affect operations there.

Recovery has been a slow process, but Copeland said it’s an eye-opener of how important IT departments are for the City, and any municipality.

“The city staff, the computer people behind the scenes, they did a tremendous job. They worked every single day, long into the night. We hired an expert to come in and see what was going on. Interesting way that the person came into the system. That’s about as much as I’ll say. It just speaks to volumes, for companies out there, for municipalities, take this cyber threat real,” he said. 

“I know that a lot of media had reached out to me and they really wanted a lot of details. But why would we give the bad people that do this stuff for a living more information…that’s why we were very evasive on on the information we’re giving out.”