The State and Local Cyber Threat Landscape in Two Reports
Verizon and Symantec’s breach investigations signal that governments are growing targets, and small jurisdictions lacking resources are the most vulnerable.
Public sector entities suffered 239 of 1,935 breaches, 12 percent, identified by Verizon in its 10th annual Data Breach Investigations Report, making them the third-largest victims behind financial and health care organizations.
Cyberespionage linked to state-affiliated actors, unapproved and possibly malicious misuse of organizational resources, and errors compromising data security accounted for 81 percent of all such breaches.
Most of these breaches are external, result in personal data or secrets being compromised, and take years to discover.
“The public sector is under-resourced, meaning that money stolen is rarely recovered and cybercrimes go unpunished,” according to British law firm Mishcon de Reya in the report. “As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, this kind of crime shows no sign of slowing down.”
Entities studied included everything from national security agencies to local zoning boards
Email, and most attackers were state-affiliated because “other governments want to know what our government is thinking.”
Internal breaches are also typical, such as a police officer accessing a criminal database inappropriately—fun/curiosity being a motive 13 percent of the time.
Government’s slow response to breaches could be the result of cloaked attacks that occur patiently over a prolonged period of time, so as to avoid suspicion, or smaller agencies’ lack of resources to spot problems sooner.
When Verizon examined only social breaches, more often than not public agencies were the victims.
Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report builds upon Verizon’s findings, noting targeted attacks are becoming more “public, politically subversive activities.”
Notable attack groups include possibly Russian-based Fritillary and Swallowtail, which engage in tactics like spear phishing for espionage and subversion—most notably the Democratic National Committee hacks.
About 1 in every 2329 public administration emails is a phishing attempt, according to the report, making it the fourth-most targeted sector.
In terms of total number of breach incidents per sector, transportation and public utilities was in fifth place with 75 breaches, or 7.3 percent, and 6,243,712 identities stolen.
The Internet of Things is also a growing concern for governments placing sensors in everything from snowplows to streetlights, per Symantec’s report:
The number of IoT devices will continue to grow and this may lead to increased calls for regulation of the IoT industry as the only way to deal with the security problem. If regulation becomes a possibility, the next question will be whether it would be best applied at the industry level or the government level.”
Dave Nyczepir is a News Editor at Government Executive’s Route Fifty and is based in Washington, D.C.
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