Wichita CIO warns of rising cyber threats, shows deepfake of mayor during council briefing

Chief Information Officer and Director of IT Mike Bridal briefed the Wichita City Council on the city's cybersecurity posture on Friday, describing recent incident response, current alert volumes and recovery goals, and closing with a live demonstration of how artificial intelligence can be used to create convincing deepfake clips.

Bridal said the city supports roughly 3,100 employees with a 61‑person IT team and manages more than 3,600 cloud entities and 450 on‑premise servers. "We're around 10,000 pieces of technology that we have to support with 61 folks," Bridal said, summarizing the scale of the environment and the operational challenge.

He recounted recent activity levels and an incident response: in the past 30 days the city recorded about 1,100 alerts, which resulted in one contained incident and two tickets; the city's firewalls blocked about 79,000 threats during the same period. Bridal said the city experienced a cyber intrusion this month but contained it to a single entity. He also described a larger '24 event that took about 28 days to restore systems and said the city's goal is to reduce recovery time from weeks to days and to negotiate service‑level agreements (SLAs) with departments to enable faster recovery.

Bridal emphasized that modern threat actors use machine‑speed tools and AI. To demonstrate how convincing fabricated media can be, he played a short clip that used an image and sample audio of Mayor Lily Wu to create the appearance the mayor was giving an urgent infrastructure direction. The recorded clip includes the audio phrase presented as "It's Lily Wu, mayor of City Of Wichita." Bridal used the example to show how quickly an attacker could simulate a trusted official and to urge caution when following unexpected digital requests.

Council members praised the IT staff’s response to prior incidents and asked how the city will fund and maintain recovery capacity. Bridal said the city is preparing SLAs and engaging departments to define recovery objectives, and that investments will be part of near‑term budget and operational planning.

What’s next: the presentation concluded with brief council questions and thanks. The CIO recommended increased employee training, tighter contractual arrangements with cloud vendors, and continued investment in rapid recovery capabilities.

Sources: Presentation and Q&A by Mike Bridal (speaker 6); brief remarks of praise from council members (speaker 3).