

MIDLAND, Texas (KOSA) -Last year, we saw the effect of the cyber-attack on the city of Odessa, stopping the municipal court, and the city of Midland has decided to ramp up its security system to prevent any cyber-attacks.
Odessa and Abilene are the recent victims of a cyber-attack. There have been over ninety-three thousand cyber-attack attempts on the city of Midland.
“So far, we have been able to withstand those things, but we recognize that everyone is trying to continue to try. The criminal activity related to cybersecurity is very persistent and recognizes that they are not going to give up,” said Lori Blong, Mayor of Midland.
After the cyber-attack that hit Abilene, the city of Midland sent a team to Abilene to help work out some of the problems they faced.
“We brought back some of that information to inform some improvements that we need to make to our system, so the city of Midland has taken a comprehensive look at what we are doing for cybersecurity. Doing so, we have a lot of things in place,” said Lori Blong.
The city of Midland added new firewalls, anti-malware, VPN, and multi-factor authentication.
The city of Midland will be adding a higher-end backup system to maintain data and adding new servers for increased space and recovery capabilities.
“Our water system and 911 system. We have so many things within our community, just the public safety requires good cybersecurity, and so we are building in some additional measures to make sure those are secured,” said Lori Blong.
The city of Midland is also going to be providing more training for the employees to have a good awareness of possible threats.
“We have some test emails that go out to see if we can trick employees to make the wrong decision, and we are training them okay that was not the right thing to do. This is what you should look out for next time, and so that process is to train employees,” said Lori Blong.
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