After suffering serious ransomware attacks on its zoo and public library system, the city Toronto has decided to integrate its IT systems for better cybersecurity, the Toronto Star reports.
“The city of Toronto’s main system is one of the most secure in North America, second to New York,” the news agency quotes Mayor Olivia Chow saying at a press conference. Bringing all the city-linked organizations under the city’s umbrella would make them “far more secure,” she said.
City agencies like the library, zoo, and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), have their own IT systems.
The decision to merge systems comes after the Toronto Zoo was hit earlier this month and the Toronto Public Library was hit in October. The library attackers stole information on current and former staff, including their names, social insurance numbers, date of birth, and home address. Copies of government-issued identification documents provided to the library by staff were also likely taken.
The library still hasn’t fully restored its systems. In an update today, it said the home page of its website will be restored by the end of the month. However, online access to the full catalogue and users accounts won’t be restored until February.
“We recently restored network connectivity to more than 3,000 staff computers,” the statement says. “This needed to happen before reconnecting our 2,000 public computers to the network.”
Use of public computers in branches for connecting to the internet will return early in February. However, a date for restoring the ability of users to print documents from public computers hasn’t been set.