COVID-19 has forced hundreds of thousands of government and public safety staff to rapidly shift from the traditional office setting to remote offices located in their homes. These employees have gone to work in the same building every day for years, often with a badge for secure building access, and essentially followed the same daily operations. But now, everything has changed.

In early May, the city of Baltimore was hit by a massive ransomware attack which crippled city employees and residents from their day-to-day tasks for weeks, ultimately costing millions in taxpayer dollars. Ransomware, a type of malware or malicious software that weaponizes encryption, is used by hackers to first encrypt data on a victim’s machine, blocking access to a computer system or service.

The role of mobile technologies within the field of law enforcement continues to grow in both importance and number of applications. Law officers count on these technologies for much more than simply receiving dispatch calls or looking up arrest records. Officers are using mobile devices in the field for capturing photo evidence, fingerprinting suspects at the scene, conducting interviews, issuing tickets and citations, managing personnel tracking and deployment, and much more.

The breaches of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center and the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been hot topics in the last month. Hollywood Presbyterian because it’s so fresh in our minds and the OPM because of the fallout resulting from it, including House Oversight Committee hearings and the (forced) resignation of its CIO.

The Department of Defense and other federal agencies with national security responsibilities need extra layers of protection to efficiently secure data, especially from the inside. For this critical level of protection, many organizations employ a variety of technologies, including advanced endpoint protection, database activity monitoring, and identity and account management tools, not only to help guard against internal threats, but to also manage their systems more efficiently.