The City of Fort St. John announced Monday that services are gradually coming back online following last week’s cyber attack that disrupted a number of city services.
Residents were informed that email services have been successfully restored, enabling the processing of all payments and receivables. In addition, telephone services, including the 3-1-1 line for reporting problems, are back in operation.
“We can confirm that no critical systems, such as water, wastewater treatment, or emergency response, have been impacted,” said the city.
The cyber incident prompted the activation of a cyber incident response last week to identify and assess the cause of the outage. Throughout the incident, the city’s IT team has been working to restore server, internet, phone, and email access for residents and city officials.
City officials confirmed to CJDC-TV today that there remains no word on the source of the attack and whether any personal information was breached.
They city still looking into what, if anything, was accessed. The focus remains on the front-end user experience with backend serve issues taking loner to resolve.
“We continue to work with cyber security experts and relevant authorities to investigate the incident’s extent and impact,” said the city in a Facebook post. They also thanked residents for their patients as they work to restore service “over the next little while.”
Once services are restored, a “comprehensive analysis” will be conducted in an effort to strengthen systems and mitigate future occurrences.
There is currently no timeline as to when the system will be fully restored. Another update is expected later this week.
A full list of impacted services and their status is available on the city’s website.