Local Government

The city and school district of Lowell, Mass. have allocated more than $1 million combined to purchase LifeLock protection for all city and school employees impacted by a ransomware attack earlier this month.

Officials with the city of Dallas have not definitively outlined the full scope of the May 3 cyber attack that disrupted its systems. They have also not released whether the perpetrators demanded any sort of ransom.

The police department has installed 172 license plate reading cameras throughout the city. The controversial tech is touted as a way to identify criminal suspects and stolen vehicles, but opponents say they’re a privacy concern.

The New York county government has converted its website and email addresses to .gov domains. The addresses require stricter security control and are only available to U.S.-based government agencies.

A nation-state sponsored actor is using living-off-the-land techniques to hide its activity and spy on U.S. targets, and possibly plan communication disruptions, Microsoft said. CISA and Microsoft released details to help potential victims identify and mitigate the threat.

The Los Angeles City Council has decided – in an 8-4 vote – to accept the donation of a nearly $280,000 dog-like robot for the police department's use. The technology has been a point of contentious public debate.

A recent panel discussion at the CoMotion Miami conference highlighted how political divisiveness and conspiracy theories have taken aim at progressive ideas around urban mobility and city design.

With staffing issues and few resources, rural counties are most likely to have missed the deadline for correcting the broadband map, meaning they will miss out on millions of dollars in federal funding meant to bring the Internet to rural America.

New research suggests that when government agencies include diversity, equity and inclusion in the hiring process, it can improve hiring outcomes across federal, state and local governments.

Officials in the California city are reporting that the gunshot detection sensors they installed in gun crime hot spots are not working properly. The city is working with the vendor, Flock Safety, to resolve the technical issues.

The union representing the city’s 2,500 traffic agents — who are part of the NYPD and write parking tickets and direct traffic — are asking in contract talks for the same type of body-worn cameras used by police officers.

Edwardsville, Ill., police and fire officials voiced their support to the City Council for a new digital database that would help to track state legislation affecting their departments.

The data, released by the ransomware group Play, seems to include personal and personnel data such as medical billing records and employee disciplinary cases. The data was posted on the dark web May 11.

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day intended to start the conversation about digital access and inclusion for people worldwide with disabilities. So, what should government agencies know about the road ahead?

Officials have been unable to access important data for a week because their server host has been unable to connect with its server farm. Several other counties across the Midwest are also experiencing outages.

Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, the Indiana Broadband Office, and the Office of Community and Rural Affairs announced Decatur County has been designated as the state's 77th Broadband Ready Community.

The city implemented a system to identity and detect drone activity in restricted airspace or near critical infrastructure. The deployment comes well ahead of the FAA mandate that requires drones be equipped with remote identification capability.

The city's recently announced cybersecurity and digital services apprenticeship program will help upskill job seekers in underrepresented communities and connect them to the city’s IT workforce.