What if every person in the United States – about 333,000,000 people – had tried to hack into Sacramento County government information systems in 2021?
The reality is that the amount would still be shy by roughly 27 million. Last year, there were a whopping 360 million unauthorized attempts to connect to Sacramento County information systems, and each of them was successfully blocked by network filters. At the same time, email filters were successfully blocking 145 million malicious email messages.
In 2021, Sacramento County Successfully Blocked Cyber Threats:
- 360,000,000 Unauthorized Network Attempts
- 145,000,000 Malicious Email Message Attempts
Network and email filters are just two of the ways Sacramento County’s Department of Technology (DTech) is working vigorously to protect the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of the County’s information systems and the data within them. Some other ways:
- Every day, cybercriminals try to trick Sacramento County employees into clicking malicious links. Thanks to DTech’s ongoing Security Awareness training required for the entire workforce, employees are becoming more sophisticated about these persistent “phishing” attempts. In the fourth quarter of 2021, employee and contractor phishing susceptibility was only 6.6 percent, compared to 17.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, and compared to the overall government susceptibility rate of 26 percent.
- To prevent cybercriminal takeovers of County accounts, DTech has implemented two-factor authentication, which requires users to verify their sign-in to County systems, webmail and other external-facing web services.
- Whenever a vulnerability is discovered in systems or workstations, DTech takes quick and thorough action to implement a software patch. Today, 99 percent of critical and important security patching is being completed within 30 days.
“The fact is, we are so focused on cybersecurity that most of our 14,000+ Sacramento County employees have no idea of the millions of malicious attacks we are blocking and intercepting on our network and email systems every single day. It is now our reality that all U.S. government agencies, big or small, are a target for cybercriminals from all over the globe. We make every effort to be one step ahead of the millions who try to break in,” said, CIO and DTech Director Rami Zakaria.
Each workday, County workforce members go about their tasks knowing that although there is an army of cybercriminals constantly seeking to steal County data or disrupt operations, only a very tiny fraction of these attempts will succeed. DTech’s mission is to keep shrinking that tiny fraction.
