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Alberni escapes municipal computer hack

Port Alberni has avoided a computer software hacking that hit other municipalities on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland.

The City of Port Alberni’s website has escaped a municipal software hacking that hit the District of Maple Ridge, City of Abbotsford, Oak Bay, City of Victoria and others.

City manager of information services Jeff Pelech said the issue was first discovered elsewhere in early July in land utilties software that many municipalities in B.C. use.

“There was a vulnerability found within a piece of software a lot of municipalities were using for [people paying] taxes and utilities,” Pelech said.

“The website hacks have been quite a topic of conversation among municipal IT techs.”

Adobe started notifying people a couple of weeks ago about a possible breach and putting out patches for their product to correct the vulnerability.

Port Alberni has already begun to run the patch, and Pelech said so far the city has escaped hacking.

“We’ve gone through what everybody else has said and so far we’re fine.”

A city hall Twitter account that was hacked last week was unrelated to the software issue, Pelech said. That issue has also been fixed.

editor@albernivalleynews.com