Election security is the hot button issue these days, but the threat of cyberattacks goes well beyond voting machines. Local governments too are vulnerable and, since updating systems is costly, they will likely remain so. That’s a problem.
Unless you’re an anarchist, you probably want local services — police, fire, sanitation, transit, and yes, your county board of elections — to be up and running rather than locked out with ransomware. In towns from Alaska to Maine to California, however, hackers have successfully shut down local services and brought local government to a standstill.
[Related: Devin Nunes calls for ban on electronic voting systems]
Even though attacks, like the one that brought down local government in Matanuska-Susitna near Anchorage, Alaska, might not seem newsworthy (except for their novel solution of using typewriters), similar attacks have happened across the country and point to unaddressed vulnerabilities within the U.S.
In November 2016, for example, the San Francisco Municipal Railway was targeted by ransomware which temporarily prevented the system from collecting fares until they managed to hack their own system. More recently, in November 2017, the Sacramento Regional Transit System was the target of a ransomware attacked that deleted 30 million files before it could be stopped.
In March 2018, Atlanta’s city systems were breached, resulting in the shutdown of important city networks, employees being told not to turn on computers, and the mayor warning citizens that range of personal data stored by the city could have been compromised.
In April of this year, Rockport, Maine, was faced with a ransomware attack that shut down local government. Although most of the files were recovered and the city did not end up having to pay the ransom, this is yet another example of vulnerable municipal systems.
These are just a few recent examples of how municipalities have been compromised and will likely be vulnerable in the future too.
Although all of these instances were resolved with minimal damages, cyberattacks outside of the U.S. point to just how devastating a shutdown of critical infrastructure and local governments can be. Among the victims of the 2017 WannaCry attack that infected 200,000 computers in 150 countries were local governments in several parts of India as well as National Health Service hospitals in England and Scotland. Colleges, governments, railways, health systems and multinational companies were all victims of the attack, traced to North Korea by intelligence agencies, that created chaos for days and cost billions of dollars in damages.
Attacks like that one, or like the 2015 shutdown of part of Ukraine’s power grid around Christmas by hackers who cut power to more than 200,000 customers, should have been a wake-up call when they happened.
Instead, as indicated by the recent breaches, we still have a long way to go and local and state governments, not just federal agencies, must be better prepared to prevent attacks.
In part, of course, these threats can be mitigated by national initiatives such as those that were the focus of the Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity summit earlier this week. But there are also steps that can take place locally.
A good place to start would be updating old operating systems and making sure that computers are running the latest versions of software that has been patched to mitigate threats. Additionally, municipalities should, like the federal government, build ties to the private sector on cybersecurity to both head off existing threats and have a unified response in the case of future attacks. Finally, local governments should be vigilant about ensuring staff members and elected officials are up to date on data security practices.
Although none of these will completely prevent the threat of attack, they will make it more difficult. The first step, of course, is recognizing that the problem exists and taking it seriously.
