NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Todd Davis with the City of Hutchinson talked to the Hutchinson City Council about keeping the data of Hutchinson residents safe after receiving a proclamation for Cyber Security Month at the council's meeting on Tuesday.
"What are the top five cybersecurity threats?," Davis said. "As of 2021, it's phishing attacks, which means that through emails, people are trying to get to your stuff, ransomware, which is when they finally get through your defenses, then they try to steal your systems or make you pay money to get your stuff back, zero-day exploits, which are new problems, which have been found by bad guys and they exploit those to get us. IOT vulnerabilities, IOT is like water and sewer and your Amazon Echo and your lights and your Ring doorbell and all those kinds of things. That's the fourth major vulnerability and supply chain attacks. Even though we're safe, we've got to make sure everybody we deal with is safe."
There's a lot about keeping the city's systems safe that requires constant attention to be paid to those issues, according to Davis.
"It's really important that we review cybersecurity, that we keep it upmost in our minds," Davis said. "One of the things that the City of Hutchinson is doing this year is, we're going to be doing training for our employees, so I'll have a bunch of little training classes to make sure that everybody's on board with cybersecurity. I attended a cybersecurity conference where they had a white hat hacker in. He showed us the thread of how they hack to get into systems. He's right at 99% of being able to get into any system. 80% of the time it's human engineering."
In other words, that's getting people to divulge information that allows for access, from passwords, to login times, to when a system is down for maintenance, any of those kinds of information that you can get from people to find out the best time to attack.
"It's inevitable that we will be attacked," Davis said. "If you looked at our firewall, we get hit with over 70,000 attacks a day. It's really difficult out there and we don't have a big security staff. As a matter of fact, we don't have any people in security right now, so we're just doing that as part of our daily duties. It's really important for us to stay on top of cybersecurity. All of you are part of that, because all of you are part of the city. All of you are in city systems. Make sure you don't click on anything you aren't absolutely sure is the right thing to click on."
Since 2004, the President of the United States and Congress have declared the month of October to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
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