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

State government IT officials said this week they are working to deploy their share of $1 billion of Federal cybersecurity grant funding approved last November by Congress as part of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

As the health care and education sectors have become prime targets for cyberattacks, experts from those sectors expressed their needs on May 18 for more funding and Federal collaboration to better protect the cyber posture of schools and hospitals.

The State of Colorado’s new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Ray Yepes is urging all state and local governments (SLGs) to develop a threat intelligence program to stay one step ahead of cyber adversaries.

A recent survey on the State of Ransomware found that ransomware attacks are rising in both frequency and complexity, with 72 percent of the survey’s respondents saying that they have experienced an uptick in the volume, complexity, or severity of cyberattacks.

Although cybersecurity continues to be the top priority for K-12 IT leaders, they underestimate the risks to their systems, according to a new survey by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

New legislation introduced in the House aims to increase U.S. expertise in energy infrastructure cybersecurity by authorizing Department of Energy (DoE) grants to expand education and training opportunities that are “the convergence of cybersecurity and energy infrastructure.”

State and local governments (SLGs) are taking a page from Federal Cloud First and Cloud Smart modernization initiatives to sunset legacy systems and migrate to the cloud. Modernization efforts have been a top priority for over a decade, with cloud first appearing on NASCIO’s State CIO Top Ten priorities list in 2010 and making the list ever since.

With state and local governments (SLGs) becoming more tempting targets for cyberattacks every day, Federal and SLG experts are increasingly urging the importance of communication between the public and private sector in order to achieve a unified and stronger American cybersecurity posture.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a lot of changes – from public health to remote work – but investing in technology upgrades to improve citizen services and cybersecurity could lead to the most lasting impact on state and local governments (SLGs), according to several state IT officials who spoke at MeriTalk’s State Tech Vision virtual event on March 29.