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.

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.

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.

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.