SAN ANTONIO – This year, ransomware attacks triggered gas shortages on the East Coast and crippled a local school district.
These attacks could hit your office, your school, even hospitals and government agencies.
The Trouble Shooters are finding out how prepared San Antonio is for a cyber attack.
“I think about it 24/7,” says Patsy Boozer, the city’s chief security officer.
She’s in charge of keeping the city’s data safe and keeping services up and running.
“We maintain our servers. We do our patching. We monitor alerts,” Boozer says.
Constant vigilance against a potential ransomware attack, when hackers get into an organization’s computer system and encrypt the data.
“It puts you into a denial of service, meaning you can't get into any of that data anymore and they're holding it ransom,” Boozer explains.
“And that's the whole point: they want money,” reporter Emily Baucum says.
“Yes, they want money,” Boozer says.
The FBI does not support paying ransom because there are no guarantees you’ll get your data back.
But that hasn’t stopped victims from paying up: this year, a national meat supplier paid $11 million and an oil pipeline paid $4 million. Here at home, the Judson Independent School District paid $547,045.61.
There are two local government agencies that store a lot of your personal information and who you depend on every single day: the power company and the water company.
San Antonio Water System told the Trouble Shooters: “SAWS recognizes the evolving threats around cyber security and works diligently to address them.”
At CPS Energy, chief legal and ethics officer Shanna Ramirez explains the risk is uncomfortable and very real.
“There are cyber criminals, nation states and ‘hack-tivists’ that spend all of their time figuring out how to get at sensitive information like customer data, like how we operate our energy grid,” Ramirez says.
She says CPS Energy uses guidelines from federal agencies like Homeland Security to protect the grid and your data.
“The critical thing you have to think about is your ability to recover,” Ramirez says. “We really have focused on what we need to do in terms of backing up our systems, educating our workforce on what would happen if this occurred.”
The Trouble Shooters learned just this week, CPS Energy, SAWS, the city and federal agents all trained for a potential attack.
“To practice a number of scenarios that might occur to cause problems to our grid. There is a huge cyber component to that,” Ramirez explains.
As for you at home: whenever you browse the internet, you are part of the safety chain. Make sure your antivirus software is updated and don’t click on suspicious links - that's actually the number-one way ransomware can infect your system.
By EMILY BAUCUM