Winkler cybersecurity incident prompts phone and payment system lockdown – PembinaValleyOnline.com
Winkler cybersecurity incident prompts phone and payment system lockdown – PembinaValleyOnline.com
Publish Date: 2026-07-08 16:12:00
Source Domain: pembinavalleyonline.com
The City of Winkler is currently responding to a cybersecurity incident affecting portions of its information technology systems.
Mayor Henry Siemens said that, in response to the incident, the city has launched an investigation, notified law enforcement, and implemented cyber protections to contain the situation.
“We isolated the area that was affected to limit further impact,” he said.
“We immediately reached out to external cybersecurity experts as well to make sure that we engaged the people that we needed to be involved.”
Due to the incident, the city has locked down its phone and payment systems, and the following city offices will be closed until further notice:
• City Hall
• Public Works
• Meridian Exhibition Centre Office
Mayor Siemens said the closures will allow the city to continue looking into the matter while some of its systems are offline.
“We’ve closed them preemptively so that staff have an opportunity to dig in and find what they need to do so that they’re not at all distracted by answering questions that they can’t deal with right now because they don’t have access to our systems,” he said.
Taking the incident ‘very seriously’
Mayor Siemens said that while the city hasn’t yet uncovered the nature of the incident, it is taking the situation “very seriously.”
“We’re looking into what’s there. We don’t yet know exactly what was or wasn’t compromised. We’ll continue to dig into it to find out exactly what happened,” he said.
He added that while the city is focused on restoring its systems as quickly as possible, it will do so only in a manner that is safe and secure.
For now, however, the immediate concern is going through “every step” to find out what happened, which Mayor Siemens said is too early to know.
“One of the first questions that people always ask is, ‘Was this ransomware?’ We’re not sure yet,” he said.
He added that at…
