The malware attack in Ingham County was an eye opener.
"We just assumed everything would work out and all these fears were overblown," Ingham County Commissioner Mark Grebner said.
"Our system just couldn't keep up with modern times and we get hit with something that just overwhelms us only because we didn't keep up,” Ingham County Controller Tim Dolehanty said.
Michigan State Police are still investigating, but Chief Information Officer Deb Fett says it started from a single, simple point.
"This was something as minor as a click in the wrong place," Fett said.
She says the hack cost the county around 86 thousand dollars. But the county was lucky.
"That is a very small number compared to what it could've been if it were something like ransomware or a more effective attack," Fett said.
To prevent future attacks, new security plans were presented to Ingham County's services committee. Fett says the most important thing they need is to update their fire wall.
"That'll let us do a lot more of the internal security that we need as well as putting up a wall between us and the bad guys in the world," Fett said.
The increased security changes come at a cost. Some of the updates they need would cost only a couple thousand... Others hundreds of thousands. All the upgrades would be around 500 thousand in total. The plan was to space those updates out over the next five years, but this hack has added urgency.
"This has pointed out that our time is up," Fett said.
Commissioners agree, it's bad timing. Because the county is facing budget cuts.
"Money is very short, so we're gonna have to make some tough decisions,” Grebner said. “But this certainly raises it security on the priority list.
