As it faces thousands of attempted cyberattacks each day, Gwinnett County’s information technology department is asking for more money to fund cybersecurity needs.
Included in the department’s 2020 budget proposal is a request for an additional $280,000 to pay for two contract employees who will help the county stay up to date on security patches — software that stops security vulnerabilities.
READ | Gwinnett approves $456K contract to encrypt sensitive county data
To fend off the attempted cyberattacks, increasing the patch frequency from quarterly to monthly could prevent those attempts from being successful, Chief Information Officer Abe Kani said.
To illustrate the scale and frequency of attempts on Gwinnett’s network, Kani showed the county budget committee a map of where 765 identified attempts to break into the county’s computer system came from in July 2019. The majority — more than 600 — were from U.S.-based hackers. The second largest number of attempts, 85, came from China. More than 180 attempted attacks came from European countries, including 76 from the Netherlands, 37 from Germany and 11 from Russia.
Patching is currently done on a quarterly basis, but an “increase of vulnerabilities” requires the county to correspondingly increase its work to eliminate these vulnerabilities, according to a presentation Kani delivered to the county budget committee Thursday.
Kani requested a 2020 budget of nearly $44 million for his department, which handles all information technology needs for the county, from employee computers and WiFi to more serious demands including encryption and security.
The department recently awarded a $456,000 contract for more encryption services, part of a multi-year cybersecurity plan. There’s a constant need for the county to improve its security as threats evolve, Kani said.
“Security by far is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Kani said. “It’s not that we’re not doing anything about it, it’s that we can never say we are secure. We can never boast. It cannot just work one time. It has to work every time.”
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