Mounting ransomware attacks against states should prompt the federal government to improve its leadership in helping states curb and respond to such incidents, reports CyberScoop.
States have been seeking increased federal government involvement in establishing information security standards, threat intelligence sharing, and research activities, said Delaware Chief Security Officer Solomon Adote during the Fortinet Security Transformation Summit.
"We've had to start to lead, and were looking to federal government to lead again," said Adote, who added that combating evolving threats has been made more challenging by emerging technologies, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
Bolstering cyber threat awareness has also been sought by Adote and Virginia Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Aliscia Andrews. Andrews noted that Virginia has hastened state and local agencies' cyber threat preparation and response with a new state law that required cyber incident reporting within 24 hours.
"It does nobody any good to hear about something three weeks after the fact. We need to share information quickly," said Andrews.
Aside from featuring over 40 million signals from the DNS Research Federation's data platform and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance's comprehensive stakeholder network, the Global Signal Exchange will also contain more than 100,000 bad merchant URLs and one million scam signals from Google.
While some threat actors established fraudulent disaster relief websites as part of phishing attacks aimed at exfiltrating financial details and Social Security numbers from individuals seeking aid, others impersonated Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance providers to create fake claims that enabled relief fund and personal data theft.
Malicious GitHub pages and YouTube videos containing links for purported cracked office software, automated trading bots, and game cheats, have been leveraged to facilitate the download of self-extracting password-protected archives.