Federal Government Cyber Security Still the Worst: Report

April 30, 2016

The federal government, state governments and even the local governments, still have the worst cyber security protocols when compared to the major private industries. The report also highlighted which agencies and sectors were the best performers and which were the poorest performers.
Federal Government Agencies’ Performance

Many federal agencies were among the poor performers as they got a low score on software patching flaws and malware, as well as, network security. NASA was most vulnerable to malware intrusions and email scams. It ranked last place in the performance chart.

The Report

The report was generated by SecurityScorecard, which is a venture-backed security risk monitoring startup. The report was prepared after measuring the current cyber security of government and private industries such as retail, healthcare, transportation, etc. The performance was measured by variables such as exposure rates of passwords, susceptibility to social engineering and defenselessness against malware infections. The report included low-performing government agencies and surprisingly, The U.S. State Department was on that list.

Worst Industries and Regions

The three industries that have the worst cyber security include pharmaceutical sector, telecommunications, and the education sector. The worst performing regions were Washington, Connecticut, Maricopa County, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

This new report has once again highlighted the government’s inability to keep its cyber security up to the mark. The government faced a lot of criticism last year when OPM was hacked and data of nearly 22 million Americans was leaked due to poor cyber security.

Best Performers

Though there seems to be major loopholes in the government cyber security initiatives, there are some government agencies that performed well on the security scores. The Hennepin County Library in Minnesota and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were among the top performers. The regions that have good cyber security are Nevada and Clack County.

The Measures

The federal government has taken some measures to deal with the cyber security issues. The foremost have been the Obama government’s decision to seek $19 billion towards cyber security for the fiscal year 2017. The amount if approved would include $3.1 billion to be spent on technology modernization of several federal agencies.