5 Security Challenges Facing State and Local Governments in 2016
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Staff Training
Training will need to be more regular and thorough.
More and more, hackers are counting on the naiveté or inexperience of the typical employee. By using schemes to trick these employees, hackers can find legitimate methods to enter the network. With new threats appearing on a daily basis, it's essential that those in the government industry not ignore this. In the past six months alone, 95 percent of all Kovter attacks were in state and local government and education networks.
By focusing on more frequent training, state and local governments can better help protect their networks. While executing such training often falls to someone in the IT department, unfortunately training and educating aren't typically in the skill sets of IT professionals. Taking this into consideration, a few tips can help lead to effective training:
- Use simplified language.
- Encourage questions.
- Implement routine education.
When it comes to the security of state and local government networks, recent data all points in one direction: vulnerability. At a time when network security is more in the spotlight than ever, state and local governments are expected to keep data private and secure, but the threat of network exposure is more prominent than ever.
By analyzing over 30 million security alerts from its users around the world, Sentinel IPS discovered that 67 percent of state and local government networks triggered critical malware or ransomware alerts, compared to only 39 percent of non-government/education networks.
What does this mean for state and local governments looking ahead to 2016? The data shows several trends emerging for the upcoming year.
David Lissberger is chief executive officer at Sentinel IPS, a managed service that relieves the burden of network security for businesses with its threat management system that is based on active threat intelligence.
Related Topics : Unisys, Stimulus Package, Security Breaches, Symantec, Electronic Surveillance
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