The Municipal Cyber Security Awareness Training Program is a grant program from the Commonwealth. This entails a cyber strength assessment at the beginning where we get the baseline for all of your users. Then we give them assignments over the course of a year, over the course of six months, depending on which track you use. And then we test their cyber strength at the end.
Stephen J. Presnal, Director of Finance & Operations
Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District
We had been searching for a long time to find a cyber awareness training program and to try to figure out how to squeeze that into hectic and busy schedule that teachers and administrators and support staff have. The fact that it had the Commonwealth behind it gave it a little more validity and the fact that it was free to us, as opposed to spending a considerable amount of money for a service done privately.
Suzanne Zarges, Cybersecurity Awareness Specialist
City of Worcester
A simulated phishing email is part of the State Grant Training Program, and they send them out on a monthly basis. They'll get in their summary email "OK. three people from your department clicked on a phish this month", so they know this can happen. Employees in my department could click on a phishing email that puts the city at risk.
Dan Durgin, Director of Information Technology
Town of Sutton/Sutton School District
What I've noticed with my users is they've become more aware and you know, they take that extra second to really think things over, both at work and at home before they make a decision.
Sergeant Corey Fredrickson
Barnstable Police Department
This could affect people's lives. So it's very important that we do everything we can to protect it. We have booking videos. We have videos from crime scenes. We have photographs that are taken from crime scenes. We have all our reports documentations. If that was ever found vulnerable or attacked or there was some sort of leak, we could lose all that evidence, and you know, the cases could be tossed out just because of, you know, one simple error.
Michael Minchello, Director of Information Technology
Town of Scituate
The network is my responsibility and if there's a security breach, I'm the one that has to deal with it, and if you're going to use my network that I'm responsible for then you need to be trained and you know, that's up to me to give you those tools to be trained, but you need to take the training and do everything that you can do to protect the network, the town. If you don't do it, I will shut your network account off and you will not have access to email. A couple of days ago, we turned off twelve accounts for people that didn't do the training, and probably most of them are all back on already.
Suzanne Zarges, Cybersecurity Awareness Specialist
City of Worcester
It pretty much empowers people to understand that you don't have to have a technical background. You don't have to be a technological genius.
What our intentions are is to train and kind of empower our users to be better aware and we can be more cyber aware community.