While the nation's cities and counties are often closest to residents in providing citizen services, public safety and critical infrastructure such as public health and transport, many have limited staffing, expertise and cybersecurity budgets. Not only are the residents and cities and counties themselves potentially at risk, public safety, public health and critical infrastructure systems are part of larger connected state and national systems. For example, counties own 45% of the U.S. road miles, 40% of the bridges and operate of 30% of public airports and 1,550 health departments. City and county cybersecurity is an important yet under-focused aspect of our national cybersecurity efforts. Further, current cybersecurity education programs are not addressing some of the special but critical needs facing local governments. This project is contributing to addressing the local government cybersecurity challenges by developing and providing local government specific cybersecurity education and training modules that can augment existing cybersecurity curricula or be provided on a standalone basis. The project includes regional workshops for local government executives to address: (1) How can cybersecurity for local governments, especially those with limited budgets and cybersecurity expertise, most effectively be addressed?; and (2) What are the most effective strategies, models and approaches for cybersecurity cross jurisdictional sharing for local governments? Lastly, the project is developing: (1) a Local Government Cybersecurity Toolkit covering cybersecurity leadership and governance issues relevant for local government; and (2) a Local Government Cross Jurisdiction Capacity Sharing Roadmap providing local governments with guidance for developing and undertaking cybersecurity cross jurisdiction collaborations.
City and County Cross Jurisdiction Cybersecurity Collaboration Capacity Building