Recovery efforts are now taking place in the City of Cold Lake after a cyber attack that encrypted and held ransom some of its systems on Tuesday, July 23.

“Once we determined that personal data and sensitive information was not affected, our priority was getting our services back up and running,” said CAO Kevin Nagoya. “Our doors are open. We are here to continue providing programs and services to the city.”

Phone lines have been forwarded at City Hall and the Energy Centre, meaning the public can now reach these facilities by phone. However, there is only one line available at each, so it may be busy during peak hours. Callers are asked to please try again if reaching the voicemail message during business hours.

“We’re thankful the public has been patient with us as we navigate through this,” said Nagoya. “It’s going to be a while before we are back up to where we normally are.”

Various servers have been brought back online, and are operating in isolated environments to monitor operation, stability, and integrity.

The City has several servers and back-ups that are both on- and off-site, protected by firewalls, as well as back-ups that are manually taken and stored off site daily. All these are being checked before coming back online to get services up and running.

At this time, the City of Cold Lake is not releasing details about how the cyber attack occurred, lest it compromise bringing servers back online.

Additional updates will be released in coming days as recovery continues.

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