With the mid-term elections looming, protecting the integrity of our most basic democratic right has become a matter of critical importance.  According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties in a digital world, election security remains just as vulnerable as in 2016 and encourages Secretaries of State to be pressed to do their job and increase security before voters cast their ballo

Ransomware tops today’s list of security concerns for governments, and no agency is immune. Just look at the statistics:

• Cook County, Chicago was a victim of last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack.
• St. Louis Public Library was hit with ransomware, demanding $35,000 in Bitcoin.
• Bingham County, Idaho paid out #3,000 in ransomware to restore its servers.

Another nameless, faceless adversary (or as the U.S Army calls them “the enemy with no face”) struck again in the last week of June. Hot on the heels of WannaCry attack in May, the Petya ransomware campaign brought widespread disruption to organizations, government agencies, and infrastructure worldwide.

Proof of performance is a key criterion for any government decision maker when reviewing potential vendors and bidders. One such “proof” is recognition from industry analysts, and perhaps the most sought after of these is to be positioned (and ranked highly) in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports.

With all the noise and hubbub around insider threats and data hacks, it’s easy to ignore that other threats persist. Most notably, denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS occur when cyber criminals make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.