When city staff in WestLake-Gladstone, a rural municipality in southwestern Manitoba, returned to work in January 2020, after the Christmas break, they discovered nearly $500,000 missing from local coffers. The money had been siphoned off in an alleged cyberattack over the final weeks of December and the early days of January. Behind the scenes was a flurry of phone calls and meetings with lawyers and cybercrime experts, but the outward appearance was one of normality. For nine months, the municipality held back information from residents, who knew nothing of the incident.
Then, one afternoon in October 2020, mayor Scott Kinley and chief administrative officer Coralie Smith held a small press conference. To a crowd of onlookers in a boardroom in the municipal office, Kinley read out a prepared statement, revealing the loss of the money, which he said had been removed in forty-seven electronic withdrawals of nearly $10,000 each. The total was not insignificant: the municipality’s annual budget hovers around $7 million. Half a million is, for instance, roughly the price of a new road grader, of which the municipality was in need.
