Facing Adversity and Preserving

On Thursday, April 25^th in a matter of an instant, everything changed for KC Scout. When Scout employees walked into what they thought would be a regular workday, they instead were told to suddenly shut down everything, because they had just been hit with a cyberattack.

That day, and for many days to come, were filled with meetings after meetings, scrambling to figure out the best way to go about this situation that no one had ever experienced before. Although the team already had a crisis plan set in place for many of their major critical incidents, they had never been trained on anything to this scale. 

Throughout this time employees faced many challenges, but one of the biggest challenges they faced was simply determining which of their many tasks took priority over the others. This was difficult, because KC Scout serves two DOTs with 9 different functional teams and a number of other departments stepped in to help.  This is when Assistant Safety and Emergency Management Director Michael White started the bi-state Incident Command Meetings to help create a standardized approach to the incident.

“I think the key to the Cyber Incident Management Team was getting decision makers from the agencies involved on the calls and setting objectives of what we needed to accomplish,” White said. “This gave everyone a focus on what needed to be completed and allowed all involved to coordinate their tasks to meet the objectives.” These meetings really brought both states together and allowed for employees who had never met each other, to get to know one another face to face.

Although the cyberattack was an unexpected challenge, there were still many good things that came out of it. KC Scout grew as a team and learned the importance of everyone’s jobs and how they all work together as a team to make things work.