Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The public sector has faced a surge of cyber attacks in recent months, targeting state agencies, schools and local governments, severely affecting operations. Several recently released cyber industry reports show a steady or growing number of ransomware attacks so far in 2024. The examples below are just some of the cyber attacks against public sector organizations this past summer.

Government entities were in the top five industries targeted by both ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) attacks in 2023, according to Arctic Wolf. Additionally, the FBI reported that government entities were the third most-targeted sector by ransomware in 2023, and Arctic Wolf’s own research saw the average ransom for government organizations top $1 million USD that same year. It’s clear that cyber threats are plentiful for these entities.

As new threat vectors emerge and cybercriminals leverage sophisticated technologies to orchestrate more targeted attacks, staying ahead of threats is more challenging than ever. We are excited to announce the launch of a new managed security service designed to protect highly regulated data and help ensure critical services are efficiently delivered.

The Snyk team is excited to announce that our FedRAMP sponsor, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), has granted authorization (ATO), enabling their teams to leverage our public sector offering, Snyk for Government (SFG). This stage signifies that we are almost at the finish line of the FedRAMP process and points to our continued investment and support of public sector organizations in their application security efforts.

Read our key takeaways from Drupal GovCon 2024, where Drupal experts explored secure open-source solutions for U.S. government websites and collaborative tools.

Thirty-four percent of state and local government entities were hit by ransomware in 2024, a new report from Sophos has found. While this is a decrease compared to the attack rate in 2023, the mean cost of recovery for these entities has more than doubled to $2.83 million. Seventy-two percent of ransom demands made to state and local government organizations in 2024 were for $1 million or more, with 37% of demands for $5 million or more.

Trustwave Government Solutions (TGS) has attained authorized status by the State Risk and Authorization Management Program (StateRAMP) for its Government Fusion platform. "State and local agencies rely heavily on their technology partners to strengthen their cybersecurity postures, and we're proud to be able to deliver a solution that meets or exceeds their elevated security requirements," said TGS President Bill Rucker.

We’ve written extensively before about FedRAMP’s impact levels. As a brief refresher, there are four: You can read our full guide to these four impact levels, how they’re calculated, and what they mean in this post. One important thing to know here is that FedRAMP is not the be-all and end-all security framework for the government.