Peter Mantos has been appointed to be the new secretary of the New Mexico Department of Information and Technology by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has appointed Colin Ahern to serve as New York State’s first-ever chief cyber officer, to protect New York from increasingly prevalent and sophisticated cyber threats.

President Biden, on June 21, signed into law legislation that ensures Federal cybersecurity experts assist state and local governments (SLG) to protect their networks against the growing number of cyberattacks across the United States.

Protecting the residents, businesses, and local government entities they serve remains the top priority for local technology leaders, according to a new survey report on city and county technology and workforce trends. 

As cyberattacks become more frequent and costly to remediate, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread state and local governments’ (SLG) cyber defenses thin and just 18 states have a specified cybersecurity budget, according to a report by cybersecurity awareness training platform KnowBe4.

State and local governments hold a vast amount of personally identifiable information about their residents and these databases have become attractive targets for cyberattacks, therefore state and local governments have made various efforts to put in place security processes to protect their systems and data, according to Yvette Florez, the director of identity and access management for the State of Colorado.

The FBI San Francisco Division is announcing a new cybersecurity awareness campaign to deter business and private citizens from becoming victims of cyberattacks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has notified election officials of software vulnerabilities found in Dominion Voting Systems equipment deployed in several states, but also that the agency has found no evidence that those vulnerabilities have ever been exploited.

Smaller state and local governments (SLGs) often do not have the resources to build a robust IT department, and IT experts say cybercriminals often target these smaller agencies because of that reason.

Officials in Portland, Oregon, discovered they lost $1.4 million to fraudulent activity after malicious actors gained access to a government email account.