State and local officials are celebrating the awarding of nearly $7 million in public safety grants to assist communities, school districts and other state and local government agencies across Massachusetts with addressing their most pressing cybersecurity needs.
House Minority Leader Bradley H. Jones, Jr. (R-North Reading) and State Senator Brendan P. Crighton (D-Lynn) noted the Town of Lynnfield will benefit from two of these grants which together total $135,000. This includes a $100,000 grant awarded to the Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical School, which counts Lynnfield among its 17 member communities, and a $35,000 grant for the Reading Municipal Light Department (RMLD), which services customers in Lynnfield, Reading, North Reading and Wilmington.
The funding was recently announced by the Office of Grants and Research (OGR) within the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS) as part of the Municipal Local Cybersecurity Grant Program and State Share Cybersecurity Grant Program. Both programs are funded through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA). This year marks the first time these grants have been awarded in Massachusetts.
“The Town of Lynnfield has made cybersecurity a top priority in order to protect itself from the well-publicized issues that other cities and towns and other organizations have faced,” Lynnfield Select Board Chair Dick Dalton said. “This grant will assist our ongoing efforts to secure the Town from these threats and protect the Town, its residents and its finances from these alarming attacks on the Town’s data and finances. We are grateful for the efforts of Rep. Jones and Sen. Crighton and the commitment by the Commonwealth to assist in this effort.”
“Cybersecurity remains an ongoing concern for municipalities and other government entities, given the increasing number of bad actors seeking to exploit weaknesses in their computer networks and databases to steal sensitive personal and financial information,” Jones said. “These grant awards will help communities implement robust safeguards to prevent cyber-attacks and to quickly respond to these threats so their data infrastructure is not compromised.”
“It is critical that our communities and the organizations within them have the resources they need to prevent and respond to cyber attacks,” Crighton said. “The funding provided by these grants will bolster key cybersecurity infrastructure that guards against the exploitation of our personal information.”
The Essex North Shore Agricultural & Technical School’s grant will help to fund the implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA). The school reports that it “currently faces significant unmet cybersecurity needs, primarily in the realm of securing access to information systems owned and operated by the District,” the most pressing of which is the implementation of MFA “across all our digital platforms and systems.”
The RMLD’s award will be used not only for MFA purposes, but also to assist with the migration to a .gov domain and for a cyber incident response plan. According to the RMLD, it has “existing pressing cybersecurity needs that must be addressed to safeguard the information systems owned or operated by the Reading Municipal Light Department. The grant funding will play a pivotal role in addressing these cybersecurity risks and threats by providing the necessary resources to fully implement multifactor authentication for all employees, bolster network monitoring capabilities, and enhance vulnerability detection and management across both IT and OT environments.”
The Massachusetts Cybersecurity Planning Committee, which was formed as a requirement of receiving the federal funding, oversees the two grant programs. Applicants submitted requests for grant funding through a competitive process initiated by OGR earlier this year.
