Last summer the city of Joplin was hit by a cyber-attack. On Monday the city council was updated on the measures taken so that it doesn’t happen again. KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.

Last week, Ozark Technical Community College in Springfield announced they had been the latest local institution that had been hit by a cyber attack, costing the college $900,000.

Last July Joplin city officials made public that the city had been the victim of a cyber attack that had crippled the city’s telephones, payroll system and even files pertaining to the City’s employer-sponsored health plan.

Shortly after the hack, Joplin contracted with cyber security firm Ravenii to shore up the city’s system and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Ray Panthenl from Ravenii spoke Monday at the council meeting, “Just to give you a sense of what we’ve been working on. Month 4-6 initiatives, big step we took was to implement a new firewall solution. The previous firewall was at end of life with the manufacturer. To go with that we actually were able to implement some redundancy with the firewall.”

It was latter revealed that due to the 2021 cyber attack Joplin had to pay $320,000 to regain control of its network.