The City of Ottawa is planning to funnel 30 per cent more in funding towards the security of data and technology for its employees, according to an analysis of the proposed 2018 budget downloaded from the official city website.

This year’s data protection budget sits at almost $2.7 million, which has increased from last year’s budget amount of just over $2 million.

This comes after an investigation set out by auditor general, Ken Hughes, successfully planted a virus in the city’s network, revealing that the city’s data systems are at risk for significant corruption and exposure of personal information, as reported by CBC Ottawa.

Councillor Marianne Wilkinson, a member of the Information Technology subcommittee, said the protection of data is crucial for the city because of the sheer size of the system and its needs.

“I think it’s something over 11 thousand individual computer stations, all of which have to be protected,” she said. “We have a number of big data bases that are very, very large because of the nature of the business here.”

Wilkinson went onto recount an incident that happened last year, when a hacker decided to take an unusual approach to disrupt the system. “We had dancing bananas, I think it was. And fortunately it didn’t get deep into the system, but they were able to do it,” she said.

While gyrating fruit may seem innocent enough, it’s incidents like these that Wilkinson said is was important to prevent. She said the city is trying to modernize its technology systems. Currently, they’re updating the operating systems on city computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

The budget for the information technology systems has been a barrier in the past, said Christopher Fulton. Fulton is the city’s program manager of technology security, and he said the increase in funding will give him and his team room to do more for city staff in the way of data protection over the next year.

Fulton said that currently, the city has a “fairly elaborate” layered system of protection, but has also begun working on ways to protect privileged accounts that have access to sensitive information about citizens. Fulton also said they are working on creating an endpoint detection and response system. The endpoint response systems are able to catch any malicious activity taking place, allowing Fulton’s team “the capability of shutting down machines very quickly and responding to the threat.”

Another concern for the city’s data protection is the increase in use of mobile devices. Fulton said things like smart phones have vulnerabilities that are patched by the manufacturers. These changes in software are something that Fulton and his team have to keep up with.

The city’s data system sees massive amounts of activity and is always under attack, said Fulton. “We monitor something like 8 billion events per month. We filter down and we focus our energy on certain things that are more important to look at.”

Fulton said that despite their best efforts complete protection isn’t realistic, but working towards protecting data is just a matter of keeping up with the rapid changes in technology security.

“You will never be a hundred per cent protected. It would take an enormous budget,” he said. “You have to keep your finger on the pulse on what’s going on out there in what we call ‘The Wild’ and have a good handle on what the current threats are, and you adapt.”