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TEWKSBURY — Lead­ers from over a dozen lo­cal communities and mu­nicipal organizations came together in Tewksbury last month to discuss the threat of cybercrime. Hos­ted by the Town of Tewks­bury, the forum was the first of its kind collaboration between municipalities and cyber professionals.

The day long meeting was an opportunity to discuss vulnerabilities that cities and towns in Massa­chusetts, and across the country, face. Ransom­ware, killware, and access to resident data were all part of the discussion.

Select Board member James Mackey, a cyber professional, moderated the discussion which was held at the Tewksbury Public Library with support from Leicester Cyber Solutions and Lowell 5 bank.

Topics such as election security, network security, threat detection, and in­ter­nal processes for cities and towns were covered. Municipal leaders were encouraged to not only evaluate their current status, but to start to evaluate weaknesses and stra­tegize ways to address them.

Mackey said, “I see this as just a first step on the long road to tackling the problem of municipal cy­bersecurity. This event was designed to introduce municipal senior management to some of the core concepts of cybersecurity. While they are not expected to be subject matter ex­perts, they do need to be able to meet their technical staff half way”.

During the session, engineers and cyber operations experts introduced resour­ces that are available to communities to use as part of an implementation plan for cy­bersecurity. First and foremost, managers were en­cour­aged to create a road­map for a cybersecurity program, involving de­part­ment heads and IT departments within the city or town government.

Even if there is no strong process in place, there were immediate process changes that could be made, such as changing passwords to non-common, non-obvious choi­ces.

Strategies from the Na­tional Institute of Stan­dards and Technology were discussed. NIST is a government agency focused on science and technology and has created a framework for assessing and addressing cybersecurity risks for business and government.

Threat detection and man­agement was broken down into several categories: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover. Ac­cording to the framework, which was establish­ed in 2014, “The national and economic security of the Uni­ted States depends on the reliable functioning of critical infrastructure. Cyberse­curity threats ex­ploit the increased complexity and connectivity of critical in­frastructure systems, placing the Nation’s security, economy, and pub­lic safety and health at risk.”

The net of this strategy is to minimize risk.

Managers were encouraged to …….

Source: http://homenewshere.com/tewksbury_town_crier/news/article_6edb8b4e-426a-11ec-8e91-fba2d675f535.html