"State-Sponsored Actors Leading Cause of Cyber Concern in Public Sector"

Foreign state actors are now regarded as the greatest threat to digital networks in the US. A recent survey of public sector organizations on the current cybersecurity landscape reveals that 60 percent of respondents are concerned about attacks from foreign actors. The report, commissioned by the software company SolarWinds, which suffered a significant cyberattack in 2020 that resulted in data breaches at multiple government agencies, analyzed survey responses from 400 public sector Information Technology (IT) leaders from federal, state, and local governments. State-sponsored cyberattacks have been a concern for years, but the report's finding of a significant increase demonstrates that government organizations, notably among federal respondents, view it as a leading threat. Fifty-eight percent of respondents cited careless or untrained insiders as the second-greatest threat to their digital networks, while 52 percent cited the general hacking community as the third-greatest concern. Ransomware, trojans, and spam ranked first, second, and third, respectively, among the different types of cyber threats. The complexity of IT, closely followed by budgetary constraints, was cited as the leading obstacle to network security. This article continues to discuss key findings from the new report surveying public sector organizations on the current cybersecurity landscape.

NextGov reports "State-Sponsored Actors Leading Cause of Cyber Concern in Public Sector"