Dear Editor:
In reference to the Aug. 13 story entitled West Vancouver Shores Up Online Defences.
As a District of West Vancouver resident, George Pajari is well within his rights to express his opinion on any matter that affects the district and its residents. The district welcomes and encourages residents to participate in well-informed discussions. However, Mr. Pajari's harsh criticism of the District of West Vancouver's preparedness for efforts to hack our databases is poorly informed and unfair. We take information security extremely seriously, and the district's security measures met industry standards for what we knew at the time. Mr. Pajari could not know enough about our internal information security procedures to suggest otherwise, because for security reasons, we don't discuss them in detail publicly. Many other Lower Mainland municipalities were targets of the same attack and reported security breaches that day. In fact, any organization worldwide running the Coldfusion web application platform could have been targeted. Hacking is a global problem, and while we wish it were otherwise, the District of West Vancouver joins the New York Times, NASA, Facebook, JP Morgan, Apple Computers and hundreds of other companies and governments unable to stop recent efforts by hackers to access their systems. The good news is our highly trained and vigilant information technology staff were able to contain the damage and no residents' information was compromised.
Michael Koke
Chief Financial Officer
District of West Vancouver
