Borough continues to recover from cyber attack

PALMER — The price tag on the cyber attack that hit the Mat-Su Borough in July has reached $2.1 million.

Borough officials say that nearly 95 percent of damage has been repaired, and on Wednesday, Mat-Su Borough Manager John Moosey will finally have access to his borough email account from his phone.

Borough services have been slow to rebound from the attack that crippled Internet, printers, email, recovery systems and backup data throughout the borough. The FBI responded to assist borough IT staff in repairing the damage done by hackers, and the borough declared a state of emergency to have access to FEMA funds in recovery.

“We’re upgrading for security. This is very sophisticated. The more they can be successful and the more people pay ransom encourages more and more criminals to take advantage,” Moosey said. “We’re really trying to prevent this.”

Borough IT director Eric Wyatt said that the price tags have not been all sorted out yet, as the insurance company still has to determine what exactly it will cover. While staff moved forward, they also bolstered their online protection. Wyatt said the borough beefed up its security to the standards of the Department of Defense, and 35 to 45 percent of the upgrades puts the borough years ahead of where it was as far as security standards. Wyatt said that these types of attacks often take up to six months to recover from, and the borough is nearing the finish line in just over two months. Cyber attacks of this nature have been reported across the world, including the same attack on the city of Valdez. Director of Public Works Terry Dolan will receive access to his email later this week as well. Massachusetts firm Recorded Future reported that the spike in activity from the suspected hackers occurred around the same time as when Gov. Bill Walker took borough staff on his trade trip to China. Wyatt suspects it’s just coincidence.

“They warned us to be prepared to have them intercept your emails, have your communications intercepted. That’s what they do there. Everybody who was there should’ve been protected,” Moosey said.

Programs that the IT staff have been able to get back online are useful to the members of the public such as parcel viewer which allows real estate agents and potential homeowners to view property and it’s appraised value, and online swimming lesson registration, which caused a stir due to the number of swimmers who had to register at the same time.

“For our work it was inconvenient but the crying shame is we weren’t able to provide services to our citizens. We have groups of people that depend on us,” Moosey said.

Wyatt also detailed that the insurance funds would not be available immediately because prior to this string of attacks, the average damage was around $1 million. The average cyber attack is now closer to $3.5 million.

“We have no idea where this came from,” Moosey said. “It might just be a coincidence that we went to China and it happened.”