Public-Private Cybersecurity Defense Partnership
The city of San Antonio is teaming up with private company CPS Energy to create a $4 million cybersecurity defense center to protect the area from cyberthreats. The location will also house other municipal teams, be open 24-hours a day, and will protect services like schools and transit.
This initiative is coming on the heels of a cyberattack on a San Antonio independent school district this past summer. The Judson Independent School District was knocked offline for a month and had to pay half a million dollars to protect sensitive information.
The idea for the center isn’t new though, first conceived in 2017 and envisioned with the idea that protecting more of the central Texas region keeps San Antonio safer. Just last year, the project made major headway as the city approved a rent-free 20,000-square-office space.
Progress is similarly occurring at the state level in Texas, with recent legislation requiring that the Department of Information Resources establishes policies to help state services get up to speed with cybersecurity.
Run ins like the one with Judson will often spur countermeasures. The concept of regional cybersecurity defense is starting to gain steam lately, allowing for consistency and minimum levels of security to be met versus a more patchwork approach. We’ve also seen legislation passed that requires county offices like the recorder or courts to go through all of their old documents and redact sensitive information like minor names, social security numbers, and dates of birth so they’re never put in jeopardy if the documents are compromised.
The idea of removing all personally identifiable information from your historical documents generally seems like a pretty daunting task. The need can arise from a protective piece of legislation, but also from proactive moves, like when records are deliberately made available to the public online with an open records initiative.
Whether it be for compliance, protection, or a proactive measure, if redacting sensitive information from historical and day-forward documents is something you’d like to accomplish, our automated redaction software can help. It instantly reads the entirety of a document, identifies the information you’re looking for through context rather than templating, and then makes the text irretrievable. If you’d like to discuss further or see a demonstration of the software, please send us a note.
