BRYAN, Texas — From Atlanta to Baltimore, cyber attacks are hitting the country constantly, and it’s not just a big city problem.
This week, TEEX is hosting a training to explain how cyber attacks happen and how local government can fix them.
“The bad guys have to be right once, we have to be right all the time because again, it’s not a matter of if, but when,” said Andrew Jarrett, the program manager for TEEX's Cyber Readiness Center.
Smaller areas like Brazos County are just as susceptible to a cyber attack as any major city, and TEEX is tackling what they say is an inevitability head on.
“Cyber attacks are not going away. We are constantly dealing with newer threats... as we get better at responding to cyber attacks, the attackers get better at launching them,” Jarrett said.
There aren’t really many computers at this training. It's all about communication on how to solve cyber security breaches.
“Our students are gonna break into groups and they’re gonna be the water department or city hall for a fictitious city and they’re going to have a massive cyber attack that they’re gonna have to recover from,” said Jarrett.
One of the training's attendees, Eric Caldwell, Brazos County's Chief Information Officer said the session “has reinforced a realization that I need to be thinking about bringing in emergency management for incident response and recovery.”
Caldwell was prompted to bring this TEEX course to the Brazos Valley after 23 Texas agencies were hit by a ransomware attack last August.
“I expect my colleagues like me to take away from this tools that we can use to prevent cyber incidents in the future,” Caldwell said.
According to Jarrett, “The days of preventing attacks completely are pretty much over... we’re definitely trying to give the good guys more tools and keep the bad guys from being as effective.”
TEEX holds these courses around the country.
To find out more about them, visit their website.
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