Cybersecurity for Cities & Towns
Cybersecurity for Cities and Towns
Practical security programs for municipal IT teams that support finance, public works, police, and fire with limited staff.
A city's IT department secures payroll and finance, utility billing, permitting, the police department's systems, and the network in every fire station and yard, usually with a handful of people. The threat is the same one facing organizations many times the size: credential phishing, ransomware, and business email compromise aimed at wire transfers.
What municipal environments look like
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for every department, including elected officials
- Finance, payroll, and utility billing systems holding resident and employee data
- Permitting, licensing, and code enforcement platforms
- Police and fire systems under the CJIS Security Policy on a separate network
- Public works SCADA or building control systems that IT did not install
- Public Wi-Fi at libraries, community centers, and city hall
- Vendor remote access for a dozen different platform providers
Where HQT helps
- An assessment against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and CIS Controls, scoped to a city's actual systems and written for both the IT director and the council
- Multi-factor authentication across email, remote access, and every administrative account, with phishing-resistant methods for finance and IT staff
- Backup isolation and tested restores, so that ransomware means a bad week rather than a lost year
- Network segmentation separating police, public works control systems, business systems, and guest Wi-Fi
- Incident response planning and a tabletop exercise with the city manager, finance, legal, and the public information officer in the room
- Support for cyber insurance applications and the controls insurers now require
How an engagement usually starts
Most cities begin with an assessment, often funded by a state or federal cybersecurity grant, and then implement the top findings in priority order. We scope the assessment as a fixed-price engagement that fits under a city's informal purchase threshold, and we write the report so that the next budget request has evidence behind it.