Council bosses are employing a pair of 'ethical hackers' to protect their computer systems from cyber-attacks.
Leicester City Council says it is under constant attack from people trying to penetrate its IT network.
The authority holds the personal details of hundreds of thousands of people and organisations on its files which are a tempting target for cyber-criminals.
The manner in which the council defends itself from such attacks was discussed during a recent meeting about a new system the it is developing to log complaints.
Councillors raised concerns about how secure people's information was.
Council finance director Alison Greenhill told members: "Any IT system can be hacked.
"There are people out there who are better than the people who write IT systems.
"We take our IT security incredibly seriously.
"We have two ethical hackers who work for us and their job is to sit in our office and hack into our systems to see how safe they are."
A council spokeswoman told the Mercury: "As a key part of our cyber resilience programme, we employ two IT auditors in our internal audit team.
"They are computer experts trained specifically in cyber security.
"These are computer/technology experts who are 'ethical security testers' and have amongst their varied skill sets the ability to 'ethically hack' computer systems and networks.
"This allows us to protect our information and do business online with citizens securely and safely.
"This also helps to ensure that the council has a better understanding of the controls in place to prepare for, protect from, detect and respond to cyber-attacks including practising how we would manage the consequences of a cyber security incident."
She added: "As with other organisations of our size and nature, we are under constant attack from viruses trying to compromise our systems.
"We rely on a number of perimeter and internal security systems to proactively and reactively detect and protect against such attacks.
"Despite these measures, we still encounter localised disruption – where an individual computer may become infected.
"Under such circumstances we rely on our containment and recovery processes to limit the extent of malicious activity. In simple terms, we experience localised infection - an individual computer - as opposed to system attack and/or failure."
The council says it has not yet suffered any major breaches of its IT systems by hackers but, in the past 18 months, 11 staff have had their computers infected, causing disruption to their own machine.
The spokeswoman said: "Three of these resulted in serious disruption to the staff member concerned."
Helge Janicke is the head of De Montfort University's cyber-security centre.
He said: "The use of ethical hackers is reasonably common.
"Within the industry they are called penetration testers.
"It is good practice for a council to use them because they will hold increasing amounts of personal data that hackers would look to access.
"Councils hold people's credit card details and more generally information they get can be sold on."
