“The City of Fargo is committed to maintaining and improving our cybersecurity posture, working daily to ensure the safety and operation of critical networks.”
Nick Lindhaug is Chief Security Officer for the City of Fargo. He says Cybersecurity Month was put into action 20 years ago and he says the month serves as an important reminder of how much information each of us have and how others are looking to access it, perhaps even steal it.
He says Governor Burgum talks about the number of attacks state networks receive daily. He says for the City of Fargo, it's no different.
“State has a great program here in North Dakota. They're taking a whole of state cybersecurity approach. So each of the entities, local entities, we're on the state network and we're also seeing those same attacks. Critical infrastructure, the water utilities, wastewater and clean water certainly see high, high rates of activity as well as public safety.”
Lindhaug says as the attempts to block network attacks become more sophisticated, so do the attacks. He says trying to stop people from clicking or responding to the wrong email, text or link can be difficult.
“They make it very tricky.AI has certainly made that much more difficult to discern fake from real. So some of the best things we can do is outreach. We try and do tabletop exercises with other agencies, schools, cities, counties, where we walk through what would happen in an attack, how someone might get tricked and how you should identify it or react afterwards.”
Lindhaug says one of the best steps for precaution is taking time to think things over before taking any action.
“That should be your first indicator. If somebody wants you to take action immediately, you should question that. The second is, is this normal? Does your bank normally email and ask you to give them information or does the sheriff office normally email and say you need to pay this bill? Step back, call whoever that is or go into the office and just verify yourself. But really awareness is our best thing. They are going to get more and more sophisticated.
And so taking time, slowing down is going to be your best step.”
Lindhaug says while an antivirus program may not be as useful as it used to be, it's still a good practice to have a program in place and to keep it updated. For Prairie Public, I’m Todd McDonald.