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Cybersecurity incident has costed Hamilton $5.7M so far: impact report
The City of Hamilton has provided a public cyber security impact update report.
It provides an operational and cost update related to the city’s cyber attack earlier this year, which continues to impact Hamiltonians today.
According to the report, the city has spent $5.7 million in costs related to the ransomware attack as of May 28.
“The cyber security incident significantly affected the city’s complex technology infrastructure,” the City of Hamilton said in a statement Wednesday.
“Which includes 228 unique applications that support approximately 8,000 full-time city employees, nearly 600,000 residents, and upwards of 7,000 business partners.”
So far, 45 per cent of what’s been lost has been restored — but there is a small amount of data and infrastructure that is unrecoverable, the city said.
READ MORE: City of Hamilton shifting to ‘recovery and rebuilding’ in cyberattack response
According to the impact report, city staff will focus on recovery, restoration, rebuilding and transformation.
The hope is that moving forward, it will be able to not just recover what was lost, but build it back — better.
“This is a large-scale effort to build back stronger than ever,” City Manager Marnie Cluckie said. “Which means leading with a focus on the user experience, protecting against future incidents, and approaching everything through a lens of resilience.”
The city says its staff will begin to work on identifying applications that have reached their end-of-life cycle and calculate the associated costs, timelines and outcomes of replacing those technological avenues in future reports.
READ MORE: City of Hamilton shifting to ‘recovery and rebuilding’ in cyberattack response
