Perrysburg Township trustees are boosting cybersecurity, believing it could prevent a ransomware attack like one launched at Wood County offices in December.
Trustees at their meeting last week approved spending $60,311 with vTECHio, based in Naples, Fla., to secure, back up, and protect the township’s electronic data.
Gary Kleinfelter, information technology director, said two backups will be in place, an in-house server and the cloud.
Trustee Bob Mack asked whether this would prevent a ransomware attack like the one that occurred at the county level in December.
“What can we do or say to our residents, to assure them that what happened to Wood County, that we’re less susceptible to that here?” he asked.
“Everybody is susceptible,” Mr. Kleinfelter said. “We are putting protections in place. Solid backup foundation is a key, but we also are renewing our endpoint security. We also train consistently, and constantly, our staff on how to identify spam, scams, and things of that nature.”
He said the expenditure has three components, with the first being a renewal of services.
“The second component, I’d like to purchase a backup server,” Mr. Kleinfelter said. “We have the storage and the software already licensed. This gets us one step closer to where we can house internally our own virtual machine backups.”
“The third is to purchase Windows server licensing, for the latest version of Windows servers,” he said.
The purchases are not subscription based, as they were in the past, Mr. Kleinfelter said.
“They’re called perpetual. We pay once,” he said. “We’ll have a lot of years to be covered on this.”
The county ransomware attack was first detected about 6 a.m. Dec. 9. It blocked the ability of Wood County offices to access the county’s servers, impacting functions at the sheriff’s office, jail, common pleas court, and other county offices.
On Dec. 23, the Wood County commissioners approved a $1.5 million ransom payment to end the attack and resume services.
How the attack occurred will probably never be revealed, county Prosecutor Paul Dobson has said. The county’s consultants advised that that’s the best practice to prevent other issues, he said.
At a meeting last month, Perrysburg City Council approved increased cybersecurity, signing a three-year agreement with ThinkGard LLC for cybersecurity, data backup, and disaster-recovery solution services for $415,059.
The Perrysburg administrator said the purchase was not in response to the recent Wood County ransomware attack, and that city officials had been reviewing security for the past year.
First Published February 13, 2025, 5:57 p.m.
