At their June 18 public meeting, Ritchot’s council briefly discussed their need to beef up cybersecurity after months of cleanup effort stemming from a security breach that took place last December.

To date, little public information has been forthcoming regarding that breach. At the Wednesday meeting, CAO Shane Ray told The Citizen that it is still too early to discuss what took place since the investigation is still ongoing.

Ray had one recommendation for council, though, and that was that the RM continue to pay for cybersecurity monitoring until the end of the year.

According to Ray, Cyber Clan was hired in the early months when the breach was discovered and has been servicing the RM ever since. The company is there to monitor civic office workstations and laptops, servers, user mailboxes, as well as data usage.

 “They look at unsupported log sources, security networks, and unsupported website login,” Ray added. 

It will also warn them, he said, when internal users access websites with less than adequate security systems.

Counsellor Janine Boulanger queried whether it’s not enough to have the RM’s data backup stored offsite.

“Obviously you guys feel this is necessary with what we’ve come through, but I just need to be convinced that… we’re not being sold or snowballed on something [we don’t need],” Boulanger said.

Ray responded.

“Do we feel it’s worth it? Yes,” he replied. “We feel it’s important to provide that secondary coverage to ensure that we are covered for another cybersecurity incident. We’re separating security away from managed services, so we’ll have two different companies looking after it.”

On top of cybersecurity monitoring, the RM will be creating new cybersecurity policy which will include an incidence response plan.

Council voted unanimously in favour of extending the contract with Cyber Clan.