What’s a backup? Baltimore City IT kept data on local drives
Enlarge / This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you...from ransomware. (credit: Alex Wroblewski / Getty)
In a report to a committee of the Baltimore City Council last week, City Auditor Josh Pasch said that the city's Information Technology department could not provide any documentation of its work toward meeting agency performance goals because the only copies of that data were kept on local hard drives and never backed up to a server or the cloud.
As the Baltimore Sun's Luke Broadwater reports, Pasch told the council:
Performance measures data were saved electronically in responsible personnel's hard drives. One of the responsible personnel's hard drive was confiscated, and the other responsible personnel's selected files were removed due to the May 2019 ransomware incident...One of the things I’ve learned in my short time here is a great number of Baltimore City employees store entity information on their local computers. And that’s it.
The lost data, Pasch said, resulted in a "loss of confidence" in whether the IT department was accomplishing anything on its to-do list. In a written statement to the committee, Baltimore City Chief Information Officer Frank Johnson acknowledged the findings of the audit and said that his agency would work to improve the department's data-storage practices.
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