The Town of Westlock was the victim of a cybersecurity incident earlier this year, officials confirmed Friday.
“On January 31, 2024, we detected a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to a portion of our IT infrastructure,” Simone Wiley, chief administrative officer for the Town of Westlock wrote in a statement released Friday. “We acted immediately to secure our network and data from further unauthorized activity and engaged third-party cybersecurity experts to contain and remediate the breach and perform a forensic investigation to determine the nature and extent of the incident.”
Wiley said personal information was involved in the breach, leading to a manual review of impacted data.
She did not disclose whose data was involved.
“We have contacted those affected by this incident directly and are providing credit monitoring and identity protection services to support them. Additionally, we have implemented enhanced security measures to strengthen our defences and to better protect against future incidents.”
Wiley says the incident has also been reported to the Privacy Commissioner of Alberta.
She did not say why it took the town four months to disclose the breach.
CTV News Edmonton has reached out to Wiley for more information.
Westlock is about 90 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.