City employees are more careful with what comes their way through emails, after viruses sneaked into computers systems in City Hall twice this month.
The good news, said City Clerk Roxanne Hutton: “No one’s personal informational was compromised,” an outcome assured by the city storing such proprietary things with Tyler (Texas) Technologies.
The bad news, she countered, was that “it caused us a lot of work,” even though the city backs up activity each day. That didn’t prevent losses, including a more prolonged one when the server was hit after the virus had taken up residence.
The first outbreak came from an email with an attached resume. No one thought better than to open it — “We get resumes every week,” Hutton said. Two computers were disabled.
The second time was more severe. The same virus, coming on an official looking email, got into the server, which meant such things as payroll records, code enforcement, utility billings and payments were affected.
“We had three days’ worth of work that had to be re-entered” to the server once Advantage Computer technicians had it back up and running, Hutton said.
Emails now are scrutinized before any attachments are opened, no matter how official or innocuous they appear, she added. “We don’t want it to happen again.”
A word of caution from Hutton for anyone who uses a computer and has an email account: “They’re developing new viruses every day,” to infect a computer’s system.
Virus plagues city computers
