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With cyber attacks becoming more common, sophisticated and lucrative, the City of Fort St. John has decided to take the bull by the horns and host a cyber conference to provide information and strategies so that businesses, organizations and individuals can protect their information from nefarious attacks.

In the wake of the city’s experience with a cyber attack this spring, people in the community reached out to the city to talk about their experiences with cyber crime.

“We learned right away that this was not an uncommon event,” said Milo MacDonald, Fort St. John’s Chief Administrative Officer. “And that there are some steps you can take to make yourself less vulnerable.”

Although the incident had the potential to be very serious, city emerged relatively unscathed from it, and MacDonald feels it’s important to share their experience while providing tools to help others in the community to avoid similar incidents.

“We just thought there would be a real advantage in giving the business community, the non-profit community and the government institutions that serve our community an opportunity to get some cutting-edge practices,” he said.

At the day-long conference, scheduled for October 23 at the Pomeroy Hotel, there will be a panel of four speakers who will provide specific advice on the types of steps that people can take, at whatever scale their operation or business is. This will include tools to do a self-assessment of businesses’ and organizations’ vulnerabilities.

“Some of the panelists are very experienced in this space, supporting organizations in becoming resilient against cyber attacks. We’re bringing together experts that can basically take you to the next level in terms of reducing your vulnerability,” he said.

“We’ll also have a panel of our staff who will talk about the incident itself – we’ll describe how it happened to us and what we did, and what we’ve done to make ourselves stronger.”

The keynote speaker is Chris Mathers, who has spent most of his life working undercover for the RCMP, US Drug Enforcement Administration and US Customs Service. Nowadays he runs an international consulting and investigative firm, specializing in cyber security and forensics among other things.

MacDonald describes Mathers as “incredibly well-qualified in this space, he’s got all kinds of experience on the emerging AI cyber attack threats that are starting to be the way this business is done.”

In recent months, MacDonald says he’s learned a lot about cyber attacks, including that money received by criminals from these cyber attacks rivals the income that’s being derived from the drug trade.

“It shows you that there’s hundreds of cyber attacks that occur every day, there’s a high likelihood that if you haven’t been the victim of one, you will be if you don’t take steps.”

While learning of a cyber attack is not as dramatic as what you see in television dramas, MacDonald said the criminals made sure they knew that the city’s systems had been breached with a phone call.

“We had some disruptions in our systems, and we received contact from a criminal organization and that kind of kicked off the process,” he said.

“They actually called and were talking in quite a bit of detail about how that process unfolded on the day that it happened. That’s the way it usually goes.”