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In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, more than 4,000 attempts to compromise City of Ottawa workstations and laptops were prevented, according to city data.

“Like any major municipality, we’re a target,” said Chris Fulton, city manager of technology security, at Friday morning’s information technology sub-committee meeting. “We do block lots of malicious activity.”

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Fulton was asked after the meeting how prepared the city is for a cyber attack.

“We feel that we’re as protected as we can be,” he said.

What cyber attackers are looking for, he explained, is valuable information. The City of Ottawa’s IT system includes more than 12,000 computers, 4,000 mobile phones, 200,000 emails processed daily, and hundreds of thousands of interactions with external clients, from water work orders to property tax transactions to developments applications.

Keeping everything secure isn’t an easy task, said Marian Simulik, city general manager of corporate services. “As hard as we work to ensure that we’re secure, these people on the other side who are trying to do harm to us work even harder. We’re constantly trying to catch up, every organization is.”