Stolen realm roadmap series#

The teams provide cyber capability in each of the 10 multistate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regions.Īn example of this capability can be seen through the Connecticut National Guard’s response last school year to a cyberattack on the Hartford school district that delayed the city’s opening day. Their deployment into the digital realm was initialized about five years ago through the establishment of a National Guard Cyber Protection Team, according to a news brief issued in 2015 by the Department of Defense. Traditionally, guard units are called to respond to emergencies like physical threats or in the aftermath of natural disasters. “Based on publicly available information, governors activated the National Guard at least 41 times since 2018 to provide cybersecurity-related support to state and local governments,” Clark wrote.

“Governors have the authority to activate and pay the National Guard to provide response and remediation of cyber incidents cyber defense analysis cyber incident response planning and security planning, threat assessment and interagency planning,” according to a brief by Aaron Clarke, executive coordinator of the national think tank Third Way. With cyberattacks increasing, many municipalities lagging in digital defense spending- of more than 500 government leaders polled in the study, Government Index for IT Modernization, a quarter said their agency was not prepared for threats.įilling this void, states are increasingly turning to the National Guard. In the last few years, the rate of cyberattacks has increased dramatically-in July 2020, for example, research from RiskBased Security found a more than 650 percent increase in malicious activity compared to the same month in 2019. A study by the cybersecurity company Deep Instinct noted that malware attacks increased in 2020 by nearly 360 percent and ransomware was up 435 percent over 2019.Ĭybercrimes have become so commonplace in modern society that news of a serious data breach might not even reach the frontpage. And while the latest target might have been a cellular carrier, cities and counties are often in the crosshairs. Research from Barracuda Network shows that municipalities were targeted by 44 percent of ransomware attacks last year.

Stolen realm roadmap series#

It’s the latest in a series of notable recent data breaches. Specifically, the records of approximately 7.8 million current post-paid customers and a little more than 40 million former or prospective customers were involved in the cyberattack, according to the company. “ Some of the data accessed did include customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN and driver’s license/ID information for a subset of current and former post-pay customers and prospective T-Mobile customers,” reads a statement issued by T-Mobile earlier this week. Amid the busyness of news events this week, it might have been easy to miss that yet another massive cyberattack exposed the data of tens of millions of people. On Tuesday, T-Mobile announced that the information of nearly 48 million prospective, current and former customers was stolen.