How Permanent Data Loss from a Computer Virus Can Take Down Your City By Jabari Massey, Network infrastructure Consultant, Sophicity: We put the IT in city
and the supervisor places a call to their reactive IT support vendor who says they might be able to stop by tomorrow.
Imagine that a city employee who works in the finance department opens their email in the morning. As they check their email, they see one message that seems to come from the city manager. Without thinking, the employee clicks on a zip file attachment assuming that it’s an important set of documents related to a meeting that day.
A day passes while the employee manages to continue doing work that involves accessing software on the city’s financial server. But the employee’s computer continues to slow to a crawl until they can’t use it anymore. The city manager persuades their IT vendor to send someone over today instead of tomorrow.
This employee is not technically savvy, so they are not too alarmed when they see something downloading onto their computer. A window pops up that says to accept something. The employee clicks “yes.” Within seconds, a chill goes down their spine. Something is wrong. Multiple pop-up windows appear on the person’s computer screen and a new program seems to be running in the background. The employee tells their supervisor,
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A junior IT support person arrives and pokes around on the employee’s computer. “Yep, there’s a problem,” they confirm. Figuring it’s a virus, they restart the computer and go into “safe mode” to try to eliminate the virus. Plugging into the financial server to make sure it’s working properly, the junior IT support person now gets a chill down their spine. They cannot access any data on the financial server because it’s also infected with the virus.
SOUTH DAKOTA MUNICIPALITIES
