$1.3 million spent on St. Marys cyber attack

Just as the sleepy community of St. Marys was coming out of COVID, an attack of a digital nature was launched on the town`s infrastructure in July of 2022.

“We reacted quickly. It could have been a lot worse than it was, and we came up with a plan against the experts right away, so I feel very proud of the actions to the staff, and I can say with certainty to the public that we did the best we can,” said Mayor Al Strathdee.

In a report released to council Tuesday evening, the cost of the ransomware attack has cost just over $1.3 million. Of that, $860 thousand was used for incident management, including the $290 thousand ransom. The rest was towards a network system rebuild, according to the Mayor.

“We were in the process of making our systems more secure in migrating things to the cloud, and putting systems in place. So, a lot of money we spent, we had planned to spend, but we had to spend it all at once as opposed to over time, which is normally how we do business,” added Strathdee.

St. Marys is just one example of a growing trend of government-linked targets by cyber criminals. Just this week, several government websites have been tested, including Hydro Quebec, who fended off an attempted attack.

Technology analyst Carmi Levy said these criminals will go after anyone.

“Unfortunately, the size of the victim doesn't matter to the cyber criminals. They will go after you no matter how large or small you are, no matter how able or not able you are to pay the ransom,” said Levy.

Training staff to be more cyber-secure is a big part of dealing with the threat, but St. Marys also has taken steps to recognize weak spots before a hack can happen.

“We have a third-party company that we've hired to come in, and basically they monitor [our] system and try to not expose our vulnerabilities. So it's ongoing all the time. They will be monitoring [our] system and we have someone actually helps us to say ‘okay, next steps is X Y Z’,” said Strathdee.

Experts said this is going to be the new reality. One that companies and governments are going to have to address like other infrastructure projects in their budget to stay ahead of the criminals.