WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) - Wichita is only one city on a long list that have faced a cyber attack in the last few years. It's a growing problem that has local governments across the country doing their best to make sure their networks are secure.

"There's a lot of issues out there and you need to make sure you're prepared for that," said Kile Mangus who is the city manger for Derby.

Derby is one of many places that faced a ransomware attack in the last few years.

Mangus was working as the city manager when it happened in January 2023. He says it was shocking because the city had taken steps to be proactive and avoid this.

"You had to go through your testing, you had to work with your consultant that was brought it, and so it was about a month for us," he said.

He says the biggest impact on the city was learning to really focus on securing the network and making sure there are no cracks in the system that a criminal may be able to slip through.

"It's just the realization of the investment we need to make in our infrastructure in our network. We had things planned on the horizon and I think we kind of picked up the pace for some of those things," he said.

He says this is unfortunately a reality many cities face and are constantly working against.

"It's something that's very critical that everybody's looking at and in our Kansas City manager conferences they're addressing cyber security and talking more about options and things you can do to better prepare yourself for the future," he said.

One thousand miles away, Forsyth County in Georgia had the same realization when it faced a ransomware attack last summer. It took away the same lesson: invest in your networks and made changes to ensure your network systems are secure.

"Several different steps have been taken and added to our already advanced security here in Forsyth County," said Russell Brown, the county's communications director.

He says it took the city months to get everything back up and running. Criminals were able to access and take employee information from the system but the county says it was luckily able to get it back before it was shared.

"In the world we live in it's a very known thing these cyber attacks. There's several municipalities that haven't been as fortunate," said Russell.

One city that lost information is Tulsa, Oklahoma. In June of 2021 it announced the person responsible for the May 2021 cyber attack shared more than 18,000 city files via the dark web which are still on there. The city explained that once something is on there, you can't get it back.

"On the employee side it was their name, their address, their phone numbers, things like that," said Michael Dellinger.

Tulsa had the longest recovery time of the three. It took three months to get everything back up and running and six months to fully recover from the incident.

Dellinger says it decided to completely rebuild it's authentication system for extra security because the criminals had gotten in.

"When these bad actors do get into your system with the right credentials they can have access to a lot of internal authentication information," he said.

Tulsa says cyber security has changed a lot in the last 3 years. Dellinger says of the thousands of emails sent to the city everyday only 10% are legit, the rest are phishing scams. 

To keep your information safe and make sure nothing is happening to you personally it's a good idea to change your passwords, check your credit reports, and be aware of any online scams.