L.A. County Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Jeffery Aguilar said his office is preparing for upcoming high-profile activities – like the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028 – by maturing its cybersecurity and building prevention techniques rather than taking the usual detection-based approach.

With the U.S. midterm elections just around the corner and security concerns running high, a new survey finds that three-quarters of local election websites are not using the .gov domain to help boost site security and engender a higher degree of user trust.

County-level election workers in at least two battleground states saw a surge in attempted phishing exploits in the runup to the 2022 midterm election primary contests, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Trellix.

The Federal government’s Joint Ransomware Task Force (JRTF) kicked off its inaugural meeting with a discussion of new initiatives to collaborate with state, local, tribal, and territorial entities to protect against ransomware intrusions and disrupt malicious actors, according to a September 14 press release from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have introduced new legislation that would reauthorize the National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI), which provides cybercrime training to state and local law enforcement agencies.

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.

A new piece of legislation introduced in the Senate aims to update guidance for how Federal agencies go about providing specialized or technical services to state and local governments (SLGs). The bill would update existing guidance which was put in place in 1969. Introduced by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Steve Daines, […]

Following on the successes of the FedRAMP program that certifies cloud services as secure to use for Federal government agencies, the home-grown StateRAMP program is forging ahead with similarly vital services to state and local governments and institutions of higher learning, state, and industry leaders explained on October 5 during MeriTalk’s StateRAMP: Taking the On-Ramp to Secure SLED Cloud Solutions online event.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on Thursday introduced the Digital Service Act, which would increase funding for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and provide a conduit for state and local governments to get USDS grants to fund information technology (IT) modernization efforts.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) previewed the results of its biannual state CISO survey during a webinar on Tuesday, revealing the continued growth of cybersecurity staff among the states, and continuing resource challenges.