Strengthening municipal administration’s resilience skills

In recent years, there have been an increasing number of IT security incidents, for example due to ransomware, affecting the municipal administration in Germany. The federal government, the states and the municipalities themselves are currently developing different models and approaches on how municipalities can strengthen their resilience and what cooperation looks like in the event of an incident. This is because Germany's municipalities are themselves responsible for parts of the incident response.

The steps in incident response and capacities of assistance that municipalities can receive are differently organized in Germany. For example, the Anhalt-Bitterfeld district was able to draw on external support from the Saxony-Anhalt Ministry of Finance, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the German Armed Forces, CERT Nord, the State Criminal Police Office and a professor from the Hartz University of Applied Sciences, while the municipal administration itself was still in charge of handling the incident. In the case of the district administration of Rhine-Palatinate, the federal state offers various services, for example consulting services via a cooperation agreement between the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) or services that the state company responsible for the information technology of the state administration for data and Information (LDI) has agreed with external service providers via framework agreements. These services are primarily intended to support the costly recovery of the systems. Other cities receive support primarily in forensics and investigation of causes (City of Witten). It can be assumed that highly professionalized cybercrime will continue to concentrate on the municipal level in Germany. One reason for this is the digitization of administration, which contributes to increasing the attack surface while at the same time making IT systems more susceptible to incidents.

The project "Policy Good Practices for the cooperation of federal, state and local authorities to improve incident response" financed by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation is therefore concerned with the systematic identification of service packages, for example warning and information services or training courses that in the short and medium term can particularly contribute to increasing the resilience of municipalities. In order to identify the good practice service packages, existing services for municipalities to increase resilience were surveyed and examined in interviews and a workshop. An interdisciplinary working group accompanies the project. The results of the project will be published in a short study in spring 2023.

In the project “Design Smart Cities Safely”, the SNV is working with the German Association of Cities on behalf of the Coordination and Transfer Office Smart Cities (KTS), financed by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Development and Building. In the project, the needs of German cities to develop resilience skills are queried, analyzed and shared in aggregate form, because Germany's municipalities are organized very heterogeneously. On the one hand, because the digitization of administration takes on different structures, for example the organization of crisis management teams, the size, services for citizens, etc. could affect the resilience skills that administrations need to develop in-house which could in turn have an effect on the needs they have. In order to be able to further develop resilience skills in a more targeted manner, an analysis of the status quo of the needs of German cities is required. The analysis serves to improve the evaluation and targeted development of supporting services that are intended to cover the needs of the cities. In addition, key actors, such as mayors or IT security officers, must be made aware of which supporting services they should use to best build resilience skills. A guide for cities that describes existing supporting service packages and brings together the possible needs of cities is being developed in this model project.