Mountain View County council has been given an update on the municipality’s ongoing efforts to protect the county from cyber attacks. The review came during the recent regularly scheduled council meeting.
“Municipalities are being victims of cyber attack and other forms of IT attacks at an ever increasing rate,” administration said in a briefing note to council.
“The county has and will continue to make efforts to mitigate the risk associated with these risks.”
In a report presented to council, administration outlined the numerous ways the county is countering the cyber attack risk.
• Security awareness. “This year we have implemented a formal security awareness training program focused on phishing emails. The phishing awareness campaigns we are running reduce the risk to our systems being compromised, private information being exposed and ransom ware attacks.
“We have reduced our phish prone per cent from 38.8 per cent in February 2019 to only 2.7 per cent in August. These figures indicate that the training conducted with staff thus far has been effective although we intend on further education to reduce our security risk.”
• Proxy firewall. “We have also introduced a new firewall into our network for web filtering and malware protection. This new system protects our users from reaching malicious sites and blocks malicious content on the internet. This new control helps to reduce the threat of our computers being infected.”
• Security policy. “Another control we’re implementing this year is to create a security policy and updating our IT policy to better protect the county from litigation risks and create standards to better secure our systems and data. This policy review should be completed by the end of the year.”
• System hardening. “Later this year we will change and secure our system access controls in order to protect the county from internet threats like user error or disgruntled employees. These changes will reduce the access level that users have to their computers and network while not affecting their day-to-day activities.”
• Backups. “Backups are another important risk mitigation tool so we’ve increased our capacity to store backups locally on disks which help reduce the restore times in the event of a hardware failure or ransom ware attack.”
Council passed a motion accepting the report as information.
RECREATIONAL VEHICLES WILL BE ASSESSED
Meanwhile, council received an update on the process by which the assessment department will start to assess all recreational vehicles (RVs) in recreational areas. The review also came during the recent regularly scheduled council meeting.
Legislation previously noted that trailers were only assessed if they were attached to a structure such as a deck or building addition, attached to a utility or unlicensed, administration said in a briefing note to council.
“During discussions with assessors from surrounding municipalities (such as the Town of Sundre and Clearwater County) it was discovered that a municipal government board decision had reviewed the legislation for such assessments and determined how connected to a public utility should be defined," the note states.
“The definition stated that because the services were turned off during the off season or disconnected from any of the services, that did not mean that the services are not available. Furthermore it was determined that the development was created with services to each site and therefore utilities were available for each site. This determination would mean that all RVs would be assessable.”
The new assessments should result in bills of approximately $50 to $200 per owner, members heard.
The decision to assess the RVs was made by the province and not by the county.
