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State Training for Cyber Attacks

October 28th, 2015 by flanews

Every Florida resident has some piece of information about themselves on a state computer, and as Matt Galka tells us, that makes government computers targets for hackers, but the state isn’t sitting idly by.

The Florida Department of Education fell victim to a high profile cyber attack earlier this year. It came during statewide school testing.

“We are trying to identify the perpetrators of that attack,” said FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen in March earlier this year.

The incident raised questions about state government internet security.  The Agency for State Technology is holding a tech summit this week to better prepare departments for future attacks.

“We often say it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ when something like that is going to happen, and we have to make sure we have a good quality response and a good understanding of the types of threats that are out there,” said AST Executive Driector Jason Allison.

The state along with the National Guard will actually simulate a cyber attack on government computers as part of the training. Different agencies will get the chance to do a mock scenario where computers are attacked.  The state’s Chief Information Security Officer Danielle Alvarez says they can come in many different forms.

“Sometimes there’s an economic facet to the attacks. Sometimes there’s information they’re wanting, health information, because they’re wanting to steal an identity to receive benefits, it varies. Sometimes they’re an activist motivated attack, which we tend to call those “hacktivists,'” she said.

No suspects were ever identified and the case was closed in September in the cyberattack against the state’s standardized tests.

The cyber summit in the state capital included presentations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in an effort to better train departments to handle online attacks.

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