When Hackers Get Through: Your Municipal Risk Management Reality
Your job isn’t fighting hackers. It’s protecting your community’s ability to function when hackers win.
Recent incidents across Canada prove a harsh reality: sophisticated attackers eventually breach even well-defended organizations. The City of Hamilton faced an $18.5 million ransom demand. BC’s government networks suffered “sophisticated cybersecurity incidents” from state-sponsored actors. These weren’t IT failures—they were organizational crises that tested every aspect of municipal leadership.
The question isn’t whether your municipality might face a cyber incident. It’s whether you’ll manage it effectively or watch it become a defining crisis of your tenure.
The Risk You’re Already Managing
You understand emergency management. You’ve prepared for floods, fires, and power outages. You know that preparation before the crisis determines outcomes during it.
Cyber incidents are emergencies that happen to target your digital infrastructure instead of your physical assets. The management principles remain the same: clear command structures, established communication protocols, and pre-positioned resources. The difference is that this emergency might disable the very systems you rely on to manage it.
Consider the operational reality: when ransomware encrypts your network, your usual Emergency Operations Centre computers won’t work. Your standard communication channels may be compromised. Your normal administrative processes could be offline for weeks. This isn’t just an IT problem—it’s an organizational continuity challenge that requires the same systematic preparation you apply to other major risks.
The BC Emergency Management Act already requires you to prepare for “all hazards.” Cyber incidents aren’t an additional responsibility—they’re part of the risk landscape you’re already mandated to manage.
Two Types of Response: Immediate and Strategic
Effective cyber incident management requires understanding two simultaneous processes that your organization must coordinate.
Immediate Response handles the technical crisis: isolating compromised systems, preserving evidence, stopping the attack’s spread. This work happens fast, under pressure, with direct system access.
Strategic Management handles the organizational crisis: making resource decisions, coordinating with stakeholders, managing communications, and maintaining public confidence. This work requires clear authority, established protocols, and sustained coordination.
Both processes run simultaneously during an incident. Your IT staff or managed service provider handles the technical response, but you’re responsible for the strategic management that determines whether this becomes a controlled incident or an organizational crisis.
Research consistently shows that organizations with formalized approaches to both domains recover faster, maintain better stakeholder relationships, and often emerge stronger than before the incident.
Building on Your Existing Capabilities
You don’t need to build incident response capabilities from scratch. Your EOC already provides command structures, communication protocols, and stakeholder coordination processes. Your emergency management plans already define decision-making authorities and resource mobilization procedures.
The challenge is adapting these existing capabilities to handle digital disasters alongside natural ones.
Your EOC likely includes communication trees, decision-making authorities, public information procedures, and stakeholder coordination protocols. These frameworks work for cyber incidents with important modifications. The most critical consideration is that your EOC itself might be compromised—if your municipal network is encrypted, your usual EOC systems won’t function.
This means preparing backup coordination capabilities: communication methods that work independently of your main network, decision-making processes that function without your normal IT systems, and information management that doesn’t rely on compromised infrastructure.
The municipalities that handle cyber incidents well don’t reinvent emergency management—they adapt their proven emergency management frameworks to work during digital crises.
Your Risk Management Framework
Managing cyber incident risk requires the same systematic approach you use for other municipal risks: identification, assessment, mitigation planning, and regular review.
Risk Identification
Cyber incidents create several distinct risk categories for municipal operations:
- Service Disruption: Citizens can’t access online services, pay bills, or complete transactions
- Data Exposure: Personal information, financial records, or confidential municipal data could be accessed or stolen
- Financial Impact: Response costs, recovery expenses, potential legal liability, and lost revenue
- Reputation Damage: Public confidence in municipal competence and data protection
Risk Assessment
Each risk category requires evaluation based on likelihood and potential impact. Service disruptions might be highly likely but manageable. Data exposure might be less likely but catastrophic for public trust. Financial impacts scale with incident duration and complexity. Reputation damage depends on your response effectiveness.
Mitigation Planning
Effective mitigation combines prevention with response preparation. Prevention reduces incident likelihood through security controls and staff training. Response preparation reduces incident impact through systematic planning, established procedures, and pre-positioned resources.
The most cost-effective approach emphasizes response preparation over prevention alone. Even organizations with excellent security controls face successful attacks. Those with excellent response preparation manage incidents effectively regardless of how they start.
Three Critical Dependencies
Your incident response capability depends on three organizational prerequisites that require executive attention and resource allocation.
Decision Authority During Crisis
Cyber incidents demand rapid decision-making about technical systems, financial resources, and external communications. Your incident commander needs explicit authority to authorize emergency expenditures, engage external specialists, and coordinate organizational response without waiting for normal approval processes.
This authority must be clearly defined before an incident occurs. During a crisis isn’t the time to debate spending limits or approval procedures. The incident commander role might be your IT manager for technical decisions, but ultimate organizational authority remains with executive leadership.
Pre-Established External Relationships
Effective incident response requires immediate access to specialized expertise that most municipalities don’t maintain internally. This includes cybersecurity incident response vendors, legal counsel experienced with municipal cyber incidents, and insurance carrier incident response procedures.
These relationships must be established before you need them. During a crisis isn’t the time to research vendors, negotiate contracts, or establish communication protocols. Pre-established relationships enable immediate activation of specialized resources when time matters most.
Backup Communication and Coordination
Normal municipal communication systems might be compromised during a cyber incident. Your ability to coordinate response activities, communicate with stakeholders, and maintain public information depends on having backup capabilities that function independently of your primary network.
This doesn’t require expensive parallel infrastructure. It might mean designated cellular communications, alternative internet connections, or standalone devices for emergency coordination. The key is ensuring these backup capabilities are ready when primary systems fail.
Your 12-Month Implementation Plan
Rather than attempting comprehensive preparation immediately, focus on three achievable steps that build foundational capabilities and position your municipality for effective incident management.
Months 1-4: Framework Assessment Work with your IT staff or managed service provider to understand how BC’s Defensible Security Framework applies to your municipality. The framework includes specific guidance for incident response and incident management that’s designed for municipal realities and resource constraints.
This assessment identifies your current capabilities, highlights specific gaps, and provides a roadmap for improvement that aligns with provincial expectations. CyberBC provides assessment tools and expert coaching specifically for municipalities that make this evaluation practical and actionable.
Months 5-8: Emergency Management Integration
Evaluate your existing EOC preparations to identify elements that can be adapted for cyber incident response. Your current emergency management plans already include command structures, communication protocols, and stakeholder coordination processes.
This evaluation determines how well your existing emergency management capabilities translate to digital crises. It identifies necessary modifications, highlights potential gaps, and provides a foundation for integrated incident management that builds on proven procedures rather than creating parallel systems.
Months 9-12: Infrastructure Readiness Assess your EOC’s technical infrastructure to determine whether it can function independently of your main municipal network. This evaluation identifies necessary modifications to ensure emergency coordination capabilities remain available during cyber incidents.
The assessment covers communication systems, computer access, internet connectivity, and information management capabilities. It determines what backup systems are needed and how they can be implemented cost-effectively within your existing emergency management framework.
The Cost of Preparation Versus Crisis
Hamilton’s cyber incident cost $18.3 million in response and recovery expenses. Their insurance company denied coverage, citing inadequate security controls as a root cause of the breach. The city faces a three-year budget impact to manage costs that could have been significantly reduced through better preparation.
Preparation costs are predictable and manageable. Crisis costs are unpredictable and often catastrophic. The choice isn’t whether to spend money on cyber incident preparation—it’s whether to spend it on your timeline or the attackers’ timeline.
Municipalities that invest in systematic preparation before incidents occur manage crises more effectively, maintain better stakeholder relationships, and often emerge with enhanced capabilities. Those that react after incidents face significantly higher financial costs, prolonged recovery periods, and lasting reputation damage.
Your Next Steps
Cyber incident preparation isn’t an IT project—it’s a risk management initiative that requires executive leadership and systematic implementation. The three-step plan provides a manageable approach that builds on your existing capabilities rather than requiring wholesale organizational changes.
You don’t need to become a cybersecurity expert. You need to ensure your municipality can coordinate an effective response when experts are needed. The frameworks exist, the provincial resources are available, and the implementation approach is proven.
The time to prepare is now, while your systems are running and your options remain open. Every month of delay increases your risk exposure and reduces your response options.
If you need assistance developing your municipality’s cyber incident preparedness, my team specializes in helping municipal leaders navigate these challenges. We understand the resource constraints, regulatory requirements, and practical realities that shape municipal decision-making.
The hackers are getting better. Your preparedness should be too.
Ready to begin your municipality’s cyber incident preparedness? Contact Clint McGuire and team for expert guidance tailored to municipal realities and BC’s regulatory framework. We’ll help you build effective incident response capabilities that protect your community and maintain public confidence when digital emergencies occur.