City administrators, county officials and school leaders in Iowa may sign up for free training to help develop back up plans for technology failures.
Doug Jacobson, director of Iowa State University’s Center for Cybersecurity Innovation and Outreach, is leading the team that will conduct the training exercises. “Technology is wonderful and it works for the most part, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Jacobson said. “…No matter what the cause, you need to be ready to function without it.”
Last month, over 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota had to resort to manual operations after a cyber attack. In May, a cloud-based system used to manage grades and assignments for thousands of U.S. schools was hacked, prompting some schools and universities to cancel final exams. “Almost everything that’s done in a school from bringing up your lesson plans to entering your grades to attendance, you know, all of that’s electronic. And, yeah, teachers could teach, but have they thought about what that means to teach without technology? Have they practiced that or have they had those discussions? And that’s really what this exercise is about is getting you to think about: ‘What am I doing to do? What are my priorities for when something happens and how am I going to keep functioning?’”
The “Iowa Cyber Resilience Initiative” being led by ISU is financed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Jacobson said participants will start by listing what essential services of their city, county or school use technology, identify what cybersecurity measures are in place, and then start planning practical workaround for technology outages. “We all know that IT will work hard to get things back and running, but during that time basically most everything you have it gone,” Jacobson said. “And so how does your organization whether it be a school or a city or a county operate when almost everything they rely on doesn’t work anymore?”
Jacobson said it’s not just about anticipating a response to cyber attacks, but to natural disasters like tornadoes, floods and derechos. “And that’s really what this exercise is about is getting you to think about: ‘What am I going to do? What are my priorities for when something happens?” Jacobson said.
A city administrator who has completed ISU’s “Cyber Incident Management Exercise” said it helped identify vulnerabilities and how to prepare for emerging threats.
