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Bozeman IT warns of targeted phishing scams and plans April 27 move to bozemanmt.gov
Summary
IT Director Scott McMahon told the commission the city is seeing a rise in sophisticated phishing scams impersonating the city and announced an email and website domain change to bozemanmt.gov effective April 27; he also outlined staffing, cybersecurity and operational metrics for the IT department.
Scott McMahon, Bozeman’s director of Information Technology, briefed the commission April 21 on IT operations and public-facing actions to protect residents and developers from rising phishing and impersonation scams.
McMahon said the city has seen emails and texts that mimic official city letterhead and request wire transfers. He urged residents and developers to treat urgent money requests as red flags and to call the city’s main number (582-2300) to verify authenticity. The city posted a red banner on its website and has published an FBI bulletin link with scam indicators.
As part of security improvements, McMahon announced the city will change its email and website domains from bozeman.net to bozemanmt.gov. He said the email addressing scheme will move from firstinitiallastname@bozeman.net to firstname.lastname@bozemanmt.gov and that the website domain switch is scheduled for April 27; old addresses will continue to work for at least a year.
McMahon also described internal IT structure and metrics: four main work areas (cybersecurity, application support, systems administration and help desk), about 650 network devices, more than 1,000 supported public devices, and roughly 2,000 help-desk tickets addressed in 2025. He noted the city is looking to hire a dedicated cybersecurity position to shore up gaps.
