Fort Wayne City Council will vote Tuesday on a more than $17.6 million computer security contract, which city officials said is a necessary cost to maintain public safety.
Councilwoman Sharon Tucker, D-6th, asked to hold the item at the Nov. 28 meeting because she wanted to fully understand the three-year contract.
Tucker said she had questions she wanted to ask about private cybersecurity matters that would not be appropriate at a public meeting. At the time, Tucker was unsure if she would be an affirmative vote for a large cost for the city without seeking answers first.
The computer security contract is for the city of Fort Wayne, City Utilities and Allen County.
The city and county would each pay 40% – $11,748,583 – and City Utilities would cover $5,874,292, or 20%. The council would be approving both the city and utilities’ portion – $17,622,875.
Ed Steenman, the county’s director of technology, said the computer service cost has been included in the county budget for next year.
John Perlich, the city’s director of public information, said the contract is an investment in the wellbeing of the community.
“Having the cybersecurity protection as much as possible in turn helps the community, because residents and neighborhoods can depend on the city of Fort Wayne to meet the needs that they have each and every day,” he said. “We have a well-functioning computer system that’s safe. We’re going to be able to continue to meet those needs and all of the divisions throughout the entire city.”
Jim Haley, chief information officer for Fort Wayne, said the contract cost increased by roughly 30% from the previous agreement, based on an inadvertent omission of what needed to be covered and rising risks.
The cost for the contract is partially based on the amount of IT infrastructure the city, utilities and county have. In the last contract, a large portion was accidentally excluded, Haley said. The second factor is the added security measures as cyber threats are increasing through multiple methods.
Joe Welch, the chief information officer for City Utilities, said Fort Wayne, City Utilities and Allen County IT infrastructure have thousands of cyber threats.
On average, the network is attacked 21,000 times each month, and domains see 3,000 separate attacks. The term “domain” can refer to how the internet is structured and to how an organization’s network resources are organized.
In addition, 200,000 malicious emails are sent to government employees, and the Security Operations Center provided by the computer service contract has 140 alerts and investigations of potential cyber attacks, he said.
The service provided under the contract includes a 24/7 security center with employees monitoring the city, utilities and county’s system, Welch said.
Haley said the city’s priority is to prevent all malicious attacks, which is difficult.
“(Attackers) have to get lucky once, and they are successful,” he said. “We have to be lucky every single time to be successful – that makes it expensive.”
The city and county officials want to be good stewards of taxpayer money, but this is a necessary expense, Welch said.
“If we were to be running old servers, old PCs and things like that on the network, they’re known vulnerabilities,” he said. “It’s like having a locked front door but on the back side of your house … anybody can come in, so we need the whole thing. Security is only as strong as the weakest link.”
Cyber attacks on government entities have steadily increased in recent years. Welch said cyber attacks first began targeting banks and then hospitals, but now that both have tightened cybersecurity, attackers moved onto governmental entities.
A global threat intelligence report by Blackberry showed a 40% increase in attacks targeting governmental agencies between March and May this year. CloudSEK also reported attacks increased 95% worldwide in the second half of 2022 compared with the same period in 2021. CloudSEK is an artificial intelligence company that detects cyber threats.
Welch and Haley said they do not believe the attack rate will slow down, but instead expect it to accelerate over the next few years – and the city and county need to be prepared.
