Vigilance Is Key To Thwart Hacking Game In North Adams

In North Adams, where the City Council recently authorized spending $20,000 to update the city's website, the threat of a ransomware attack keeps the director of information technology up at night.

The Berkshire Eagle  reports Kathy Lloyd, the city's IT director, said her team is "certainly proactive" in protecting the network from attack, but it still is a worrying possibility.

Lloyd said she spends hours every week taking measures to protect the network. She declined to go into details for fear of inadvertently giving hackers a tip.

So far, North Adams has not been targeted.

She said that when the city's new website comes online in early 2020, it will reduce the number of openings a hacker could use to gain entrance, but the threat still will be out there. The current 15-year-old website runs on an older system.

If a hacker was successful, Lloyd said, city processes would come to a standstill without computer access. Record-keeping and other procedures would be back to paper and pen, and once restored, all those records would have to be reentered into the network.