How to boost cyber resilience of towns, communities, and cities

What do Baltimore, Anhalt Bitterfeld, and Witten have in common? They are three local governments which all were challenged to remain operational and provide public services during a cyber incident. The widespread vulnerabilities of towns and communities to cyber crime or state-sponsored attacks is an urgent problem that can directly affect citizens. Cyber incidents on the smallest level of government can lead to the risk of payments of social welfare being delayed, unavailability of digital infrastructure of schools and cultural centers or property payment systems being disrupted. But what programs and policies can help raise the level of cybersecurity across the municipal level? How can standards be implemented? And what effect could federal strategies have to boost the implementation? 

Dr Richard Harknett's current job is to find answers to these questions as well as test and implement them on the ground in Ohio. As the Co-Director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute he is an expert and practitioner for cybersecurity policy and is known for using the capabilities of local citizens, companies and academics to secure digital public infrastructure. He has experience working in the federal administration and regularly advises at the U.S. federal government and state of Ohio levels.  

SNV’s Julia Schuetze invites you to register for her 90-minute discussion via Zoom on 24.05 at 17:00 with Dr. Richard Harknett. If you do sign up and join, then please bring your own questions to participate. This talk is for anyone interested in how cyber policy affects implementation, for all political science nerds that are interested in how a political system affects cybersecurity on the ground, any representative of a federally organized state that wants to give their input or learn from others and any citizen that is curious about what role their local government plays in cybersecurity.

This Background Talk is part of Stiftung Neue Verantwortung's contribution to the 2023 edition of Deutsches Forum Sicherheitspolitik (German forum Security Policy), hosted by Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik (Germany's Federal Academy for Security Policy).

Please find a video recording of the policy debate below: