Technically Speaking

The AWS Public Sector Summit is less than two weeks away. This event brings the public sector cloud community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. This will be the second year in a row as a virtual event. If last year was any indication the event will be just as impactful as a virtual experience. DLT continues to be a proud sponsor and will be taking part in the day’s activities.

Earlier this year, a downright chilling cyberattack against our nation’s critical infrastructure was exposed and reported in Oldsmar, Florida, a town of fewer than 14,000 people just outside of Tampa. The attack was targeted against a local water treatment facility and – if successful – could have managed to poison the area’s water supply.

According to the 2020 Verizon DBIR, (Data Breach Investigations Report) there were 3,950 confirmed breaches in 2020. The onset of the COVID pandemic resulted in a drastic increase in exploitable vulnerabilities, phishing attempts, ransomware campaigns, and remote compromise attempts.

Crises and disasters are unavoidable; especially, from the perspective of information security professionals, whose adage is to "assume you've already been hacked." It would be naïve to assume that any network was impervious to adversarial campaigns. The difference between a cybersecurity novice and a leader isn't whether they can infallibly prevent incidents; rather, the distinction lies in how they respond to crises, mitigate impacts, remediate compromises, and incorporate lessons into their risk assessment, policies, and response plans.

An organization's personnel can be the strongest or weakest element of any security strategy. In times of national crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, tensions can run high, and conventionally manageable stresses can accumulate and degrade focus, performance, and mental bandwidth.

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) recently received a much-needed influx of funds, bringing its total to $1 billion.  This money is a small part of the funding for technology upgrades in the government, and a very small part of the overall COVID relief bill of which it was a component. The bill does not indicate how the money is to be spent but for most observers modernization is almost equivalent to cloud adoption, with cybersecurity a close second. While most observers accept that the U.S.