Clicking on email costs $1,958.85
Staff writer
Bills to fix an attack on Marion’s city email server after someone opened a spoof email containing a worm came to $1,958.85.
According to city administrator Roger Holter, the city’s email server was compromised Dec. 10.
It began sending bogus messages to people with whom city officials had communicated previous. The messages, labeled as if city employees had sent them, contained malformed links to various, generally blocked websites.
All remote access to the server was stopped when the problem became apparent. The server was brought back up Dec. 13.
Great Plains Computers and Networking charged $1,116.25 for information technology support, $475 for email updating, and $367.60 for Avast Cloud Patch Management. The Avast anti-malware system has a free version, but Holter said the version purchased by the city had extra layers of protection not included in the free version.