The City of Pittsburgh doesn’t want to talk about its cybersecurity. Its top tech official is staying tight-lipped, saying the stakes are too high to say much publicly. “[T]here’s just too much at risk to the public sector,” said Lee Haller, director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation and Performance [I&P].

But is the city just being cautious? Or are officials just avoiding a public discussion of persistent problems?
Maybe both. A cyber attack in Atlanta that’s been a living nightmare there since March has put many cities on notice. A late 2016 report on Pittsburgh’s tech systems, that has yet to be publicly reported on, illustrates many of Pittsburgh’s own vulnerabilities — and the city won’t say what’s been done to address shortcomings it still considers a threat to public safety and infrastructure.
Atlanta’s attack was near catastrophic. For more than a week, a ransomware attack knocked much of the city’s government out of the digital age. Computers were useless. As were years of files stored on their hard drives. Police dashcam footage is gone forever. Same for a decade’s worth of legal documents, rendered inaccessible after Atlanta declined to pay a Bitcoin ransom.
The response is a slow-moving crawl as software is rebuilt so a vulnerability in one program no longer puts all the others at risk.
Read more at:
https://www.publicsource.org/is-pittsburgh-prepared-for-a-cyberattack-the-city-stays-mum-on-report-that-found-numerous-flaws/