STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAW) – The City of Stevens Point is working to get many of its city services running again after a cybersecurity incident. City staff believe they stopped the beginning of a ransomware attack last week.
“Had they not caught the threat as early as they did, we could be in a much worse spot,” said Stevens Point Mayor Mike Wiza.
City staff noticed an issue after learning their servers were online but failing to communicate. Workers shut down access to the servers and began investigating.
“But we caught it before anything was actually infected or initiated. So kudos to our team for doing that. We are in the process of reestablishing different servers and different functionality to the city. Just this morning, we had alternative internet access. So that’s helping,” said Wiza.
Response and security measures
During the initial review, IT staff identified anomalies across multiple systems.
“Several machines had, let’s call it, suspicious activity. Things that appeared to be anomalies,” Wiza said. “So we quarantined those immediately and began, again, the thorough process of diagnosing the 240 different devices, roughly, we have in the city.”
Wiza said there is no evidence that any data was stolen. The city has since implemented additional cybersecurity protocols.
“We have been able to implement some security protocols that are much more stringent than what we had,” Wiza said. “These are designed specifically to thwart specific types of infiltration.”
Recovery timeline
The city is still investigating how the breach occurred while working to safely restore city functions over the next week or two.
“We need to make sure that the foundation, the servers and things like that are safe before we start opening up even small windows,” Wiza said. “If you start with the small windows, you might just reinfect yourself and have bigger problems.”
Wiza has 30 years of IT experience and said supporting city departments through the recovery has been challenging. Emergency services remained fully functional throughout the breach and were not affected.
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