Despite the slowdown across the economy, hackers are now busier than ever launching ransomware attacks to take advantage as the pandemic continues. And while hackers can be fairly indiscriminate in their targets, they continue to be putting state and local government agencies squarely in their sights.
Ransomware, which holds an organization’s data hostage until a ransom is paid, is an unwelcome attack at any point in time, but is particularly damaging during the pandemic when government resources and the conditions to respond are even more stressed. State and local governments are pivotal in organizing and executing plans to respond to the pandemic through public health agencies and in administering critical social support programs like unemployment insurance payments, not to mention the myriad other services that citizens and other businesses depend on that are all in some state of disruption.
Hackers have always targeted state and local governments due to the criticality of data they manage, but now, the pandemic has dramatically reduced revenues and the workforce being required to work from home has exposed more vulnerabilities in their data management and IT operations. These three factors continued to stress and put pressure on already limited state and local resources further reducing their ability to maintain the same level of diligence over mitigating insider threats that they would under normal conditions.
Learn About Data Resiliency in this Webinar
One local government that isn’t feeling the pressure during this time is the City of Sparks, Nevada. In a recent webinar, Ty Reid, IT Manager for the City of Sparks, David DeVries, former CIO for the State of Michigan, and Dan Trivett, Sales Engineer at Commvault got together – online and safely distanced – to discuss how Sparks has built an effective data resiliency program over the last few years. Not only does an effective data resiliency program mitigate the impact of ransomware, but it also helps address other day-to-day data disasters like provider failure, user error, that time you accidentally erased all the backups or forgot to make one, and hardware and software failures.
Interested in learning how the City of Sparks and Commvault partnered to create this enviable data resiliency posture? You can do that here.
