ABILENE, Texas — Five months ago a cyberattack disrupted services across Abilene, and while the city has made progress in its recovery, leaders said there’s still more work to do.
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Thursday morning, the City Council approved a big purchase to enhance security.
“The council was asked to review and approve a request for network switching and security devices to replace the equipment that we’ve loaned and have received as loan equipment, when we first experienced the cyber event,” Troy Swanson, the director of IT, said. “
The initial cost of replacing this loaned equipment was expected to be $1.4 million, but after negotiations, the city worked the price down to $1.252 million to purchase long-term equipment.
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“People might recognize this is, those would be switches, routers and firewalls that provide the network service between the physical buildings and facilities that the city owns,” Swanson said.
Swanson said the city will use minor improvement project funds to make the purchase, which is what has been used for all major cybersecurity event expenses.
The city has racked up a total price of about $3 million spent on the cyber attack.
“So in the time between the April event and today, we have acquired products, services and professional services to restore the technology environment,” Swanson said. “Most of those purchases are in the five-figure range, low 100,00, 200,000 range at most and most are smaller than that, and it is the aggregation of all the small equipment, products and services that we needed to restore services.”
Preventing another cyberattack is a top priority for the city, and Swanson said buying this long-term equipment is a step in the right direction.
“It will be current in technology and provide us the cybersecurity that we need to protect the city on a go-forward basis,” Swanson said. “That was a set of gear, the old gear prior to the cyberattack was gear that we were planning as a capital event to replace as well. It was at end of life and would need to be replaced as well, but the cyber event has accelerated our plans, of course, to do so, and given us this opportunity to replace it with the current technology as intended.”
The cyberattack has changed the city’s perspective on security.
“On a go-forward basis, every decision we make, everything we place in service, we try to achieve best in class, in cybersecurity,” Swanson said. “So it’s a great turning point or event for us to get to a new cybersecurity environment.”
Swanson said the city has a soft deadline of Oct. 1 to replace the majority of the equipment, but the entire replacement will be complete by the end of the year.
