💡Officer Ahern emphasized that cybersecurity funding and regulation must go hand-in-hand. States can’t cut their way to resilience, and they can’t protect what they don’t invest in.

➕Adding $100M to the state budget for remediating legacy systems and ensuring security basics like MFA are in place.🤝Offering shared cybersecurity services to counties and municipalities through New York’s Joint Security Operations Center (JSOC).

New York is responding with strategic coordination and investment by:. 📜Establishing cost-conscious minimum cybersecurity standards for critical, lifeline infrastructure sectors.💰Creating grant programs to help entities meet new requirements.

Attackers are adapting their methods because the cyber insurance market is tightening and regulatory pressure is increasing. In response, they are using more personal, public, and painful tactics to increase pressure on victims and improve their chances of a payout.

➡️ Ransomware gangs are increasingly using “triple extortion” tactics to increase pressure on victims to pay ransoms. Adversaries not only steal or encrypt data, but they also dox, threaten, harass, and swat members of the senior leadership team until a payment is made.

Primary threat actors include:.💵 Financially motivated #ransomware groups from the Russian criminal ecosystem.⚠️ Nation-state actors targeting critical #infrastructure to conduct espionage or pre-positioning to inflict damage.⚡️ Ideologically-motivated political extremist groups.

At the #CyberCivilDefense Summit, @politico's Maggie Miller sat down with New York’s Chief Cyber Officer, Colin Ahern, to discuss the State’s “whole-of-state” approach to cybersecurity. 🗽⬇️Officer Ahern pinpointed several key cybersecurity trends in New York:

RT @BerkeleyISchool: @CLTCBerkeley recently published a white paper titled, The Roadmap to Community Cyber Defense. The paper is based on….

New Report: “The Roadmap to Community Cyber Defense"; AISI Seeking Graduate Student Researcher; CLTC Debuts "10 Years of Securing the Future" Video -

⬆️Given these unique conditions, she argued island territories require special consideration in federal #cybersecurity funding formulas and cybersecurity requirements. She warned that a ‘one size fits all’ approach often leaves smaller, underserved communities behind.

Island territories typically: .⚙️Rely heavily on interconnected systems for all essential services, creating single points of failure that can cascade across the entire infrastructure ecosystem. 🛜Have insufficient internet infrastructure, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Rep. Plaskett explained how the geographic and economic circumstances of island territories create distinctive vulnerabilities that compound traditional #cybersecurity challenges.

Congresswoman @StaceyPlaskett, representative of the U.S. Virgin Islands, opened the #CyberCivilDefense Summit with remarks on the need to ensure U.S. #territories are not left behind in efforts to harden the nation’s critical infrastructure against cyber threats.

At the end of his talk, @udbhav_tiwari issued a call to action for the #CyberCivilDefenders in the audience to defend private communications to ensure there are secure, private spaces where society can organize dissent and connect freely.

Recent innovations include:.📵Decoupling private comms from phone #s by introducing a username feature.🔒Deploying post-quantum cryptography by upgrading to the PQXDH protocol.📸Updating its Windows app to block AI-enabled features from taking screenshots by using DRM technology.

He argued that @signalapp default privacy features set the benchmark for what others in the tech industry should do to improve #cybersecurity for everyone.

He spoke about their commitment to data minimization principles + described efforts to counter surveillance-based business practices within tech industry products that undermine encryption (e.g. client-side scanning).

🔑 @udbhav_tiwari, VP of Strategy & Global Affairs at @signalapp delivered remarks at the #CyberCivilDefense Summit on Signal's mission to uphold user privacy and defend end-to-end encryption.

RT @IST_org: Today, @internetsociety & @GlobalCyberAlln announced the launch of the @CommonGoodCyber Fund, an initiative to strengthen glob….

OUT TODAY! Read "The Roadmap to Community Cyber Defense" from the Cyber Resilience Corps!. In the report, authors Sarah Powazek & Grace Menna detail a multi-phase “roadmap” to show us the way forward for strengthening the cybersecurity of community orgs.