First published September 23, 2019, The City of Woodstock and the Woodstock Police Service are both suffering cyber attacks.

Ransomware has become a favorite attack vector for hackers – after all, for them, it’s pretty much a no loss game. They either get paid, or they move on to their next target. Unfortunately, cyberattackers that dispatch ransomware often do get paid, and these payments can sometimes come from a surprising source: cybersecurity firms.

Canadian municipalities are “sitting ducks” for “cyber terrorists,” says the mayor of Stratford, Ont. — the latest Canadian community to find itself targeted by an online ransom attack. Dan Mathieson said that if his fellow mayors across the country don’t start working together on the problem, more communities may be hit by online extortionists holding municipal

Ransomware hasn’t let up. It is essential to understand that any organization, of any kind, is a potential target of a ransomware attack – and yes, this includes municipalities. In fact, since 2013, over 170 government systems at the national, provincial and municipal levels have been infected.

The City of Stratford Ontario says it has been the target of an apparent cyber-attack, but officials do not believe personal information was compromised.

By now everyone knows about ransomware, the dastardly strand of malware that encrypts data (or the drives it’s stored on) and sends the user a message demanding payment in a certain amount of time before the data is deleted forever. To add a little more menace to an already stressful situation, the message includes a