On July 15th the Healey-Driscoll Administration announced the award of nearly $7 million in federal grant funds to local governments and state agencies to enhance cybersecurity initiatives and reduce cyber risk for public agencies statewide. Through this funding, the Town of Arlington will receive $98,729.76.
The grant will go toward advancing the Town’s multifactor authentication (MFA) initiative, which the Town had only been able to roll out to key personnel to date. With this cybersecurity grant the Town will be able to cover the MFA licensing and hardware costs to expand the initiative throughout the organization.
“I’m grateful to the Healey-Driscoll Administration for its commitment to supporting municipalities against cyber-threats,” said Arlington Town Manager, Jim Feeney. “With this funding we will be able to strengthen our cybersecurity posture. I want to thank the Information Technology team for its urgent response to implementing this and other recent cybersecurity measures.”
Recent cybersecurity measures being implemented by the Town’s Information Technology (IT) staff include:
- Rolling out the mandatory cybersecurity training for all staff, funded through the state’s Municipal Cybersecurity Awareness Grant Program. This training was rolled out in June.
- Rolling out End Point Detection and Response at the end of July for all Town computers and servers.
- Expanding threat defense over the next three months to include:
- Enhanced protection against spam and malware, phishing and impersonation, and domain fraud.
- Threat hunting and response.
- Additional cloud archiving and backup.
For additional information on state’s Cyber Security grant read the Commonwealth’s press release.
