Western Cape spends R24 million on its IT security from its entire
budget of R71.6billion to protect more than 900 servers, 4000 network
devices and 24500 workstations from cyberattacks, according to an
official in the premier’s office.

Augi de Freitas, chief director
of government information technology management services in the
department of the premier, was briefing the provincial public accounts
committee on Friday.

De Freitas told the committee about the
mechanisms in place to protect the ICT information of the departments of
the Western Cape government should they ever come under external
threat.

The briefing was as a result of a request made at the end
of last year when, during the annual reports for the Agriculture
department’s rural development agency, Casidra, it emerged that there
had been a ransomware attack which affected Casidra’s audit outcomes to
the auditor general.

De Freitas said: “Internal Investigations
covering the past 20 years have found that most incidents or breaches
were caused by people or technology.”

De
Freitas listed some of the causes as: “Finger trouble, errors,
mistakes, sharing passwords, ignoring IT policies, unchanged email
proxies and the deliberate passing on of information.”

Chief
information officer in the department, Hilton Arendse, said: “The
Ransomware attack was either an exploit (via email) or brute forced
access All machines were recovered and no data was compromised as it had
been encrypted.”