Galway City Council reviewing cybersecurity measures
Galway City Council has said that the cyber-attack on the HSE last year was “an eye-opener” as to the threats posed by online attacks.
Head of information technology at Galway City Council, Elaine Naughton was reacting to concerns raised at last week’s council meeting regarding Galway City Council’s preparedness in the event of a cyber-attack.
Concerns had been raised at the meeting by Councillors Declan McDonnell and Terry O’Flaherty regarding the security of the councils’ online systems.
Mayor of Galway, Colette Connolly said that she had been impersonated online.
She pointed out that people claiming to be her had sent her emails.
Ms Naughton said that Galway City Council are constantly reviewing measures to tackle cyber threats.
“We have a range of systems in place and a range of layers of systems in place, but we’re always looking to improve that situation,” she said.
“As technology becomes available to combat the latest types of threats, we will always seek to implement any improvement that we can.”
Ms Naughton said that there are daily phishing attempts that are blocked by the council’s many layers of security systems.
“We would have potentially over 2,000 emails a day that are blocked, that are either spam or suspicious or have suspicious attachments,” she said.
One of the systems in place is cybersecurity training which everybody is mandated to do on a regular basis. Ms Naughton said that the key to this “is awareness for the people at the end of the keyboard”.
Galway City Council have a range of third parties who provide the cybersecurity services, and they are about to hire a dedicated cybersecurity person in the coming weeks.
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