Sung,

Probably, not many of you will be familiar with the term of Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). However, MS-ISAC is a great tool to serve your agency to prevent possible security threats and problems.

Did you know the energy company BP experienced average of about 50,000 daily cyber intrusion attempts in year 2013 (Eggers, 2016)? It is not just BP. Other agencies like Pentagon and National Nuclear Security Administration got attacked over 200 times by cyber intruders (Eggers, 2016). Unfortunately, it is just a 2013 data, and the treats became bigger by the year, and this threat contains the States agencies and other city governments as their target as well. In matter of the fact, they are a good target for hackers. It is because the state and city governments often have the information, which hackers are targeting to obtain. Public records like student records, Online payment systems, health record, vital records, license application records, and building permits contains the personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), and other critical information, which hackers are dying to have their hands on.

Some of you may remember the cyber security incident that happened to US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2014. With that single incident, security clearance file of over 22 million people were compromised (Eggers, 2016). We know what security clearance means to government agencies, and we all know it contains many crucial information about the person, family, and their friends. Like we have reviewed, weak or no cybersecurity program in the agency can cause a massive and the worst risk from the cyberattack (Morgan, 2017), and the best way if to have a good security program to prevent our agencies from these cybersecurity treats. However, having own cybersecurity team can be very expensive and politically/technically challenging (Morgan, 2017).

With current worldwide shortage of the cybersecurity professional, it is hard to find a skilled personal to meet the challenge working in cyber security for the government agencies, and some government agencies will not have enough budget and resource to run their own programs (Morgan 2017). This is when the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) can step in to save the day.

MS-ISAC is a cybersecurity framework, which were developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It can provide agency the standard, education, and tech support for the cybersecurity treats and possible breach (NIST, 2018). Some benefits of MS-ISAC are as below (CIS, 2019):