Huntsville dealing with cybersecurity incident similar to Hamilton

The Town of Huntsville has been hit with a cybersecurity incident that has forced its town hall to close.

It’s a growing trend that cybersecurity experts are trying to warn municipalities of.

Cybersecurity expert Ritesh Kotak says that hackers go after municipalities because they’re rich in data and have many older computer systems in place that may not have recent software updates.

Huntsville has become his latest example.

The Town of Huntsville has issued a media release regarding, Huntsville Cybersecurity Incident Update – March 11, 2024. Town Hall will be closed tomorrow, the Library and Canada Summit Centre will be open. Read the release for full details: https://t.co/dO5Pd5oMCw

— Town of Huntsville (@townhuntsville) March 11, 2024

He says municipalities should prevent, detect, and invest in the right response to protect themselves when an attack happens.

In Hamilton, much of the city’s electronic infrastructure has been down for weeks, affecting services like emails, phone lines and some library services.

Council meetings have also been pushed back but as of right now, a special committee and council meeting has been set for March 27.

Hamilton says it has experts and other authorities working to restore its systems, but no concrete timeline has been given as of Tuesday morning.

Earlier this week, Mayor Andrea Horwath said that city workers have been coming up with “workarounds” to provide services without the usual technology capabilities.

READ MORE: City website outage was part of ‘precautionary system changes’: Hamilton