Municipality of North Perth confirms cyber-security incident, no details of potential compromised information

A water tower is seen in the town of Listowel (Source: Municipality of North Perth)

The Municipality of North Perth confirmed in a release on Wednesday that a cybersecurity incident took place in municipal systems on Tuesday.

According to municipal officials, "As soon as we became aware of it, we took steps to secure our systems, including taking some systems offline to stop any further unauthorized access."

Currently, the municipality is investigating the cause of the incident and working with experts to discover whether any personal information was compromised as a result of the incident.

This is not the first cybersecurity incident to take place this year, Oxford County grappled with a similar breach in September, which they deemed a ‘techincal incident.’ Municipal officials said that they had reason to believe that sensitive personal information of thousands of current and former employees was compromised in the incident.

At the time, independent IT expert Carmi Levy provided his insight into the challenges of protecting personal data in the modern digital age.

“Much of this information is personal, private, financial, it is incredibly damaging if it falls into the wrong hands,” he cautioned in an interview with CTV News in September.

“Woodstock, Stratford, Bluewater Health. All cyber-security incidents where somebody, usually an employee, received a message from a cyber-attacker, clicked on a link that they probably should not have, and that’s precipitated the attack, usually involving some sort of ransomware,” he explained.

Levy is not involved in the response to either incident.

The Municipality of North Perth recognized the seriousness of the potential compromise stating, “This is a top priority for the Municipality, and we are working hard to resolve the situation safely and as quickly as we can.”

- with files from CTV News London’s Bryan Bicknell, Lauren Kuivenhoven