Agencies faced 30,819 cyber incidents in fiscal 2020, an 8% increase over the previous year.
Email phishing and website authentication continue to be among the biggest attack vectors hackers are using to get to agency networks and data.
But despite this escalation and ever-growing challenge, the annual Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) report to Congress, highlights real progress, particularly in how agencies are managing cyber risk.
Chris DeRusha, the federal chief information security officer, said the increase is significant after seeing decreases over the last few years. But he said agencies and industry shouldn’t get too excited over the increase either as agencies are getting a better at detecting cyber incidents too.
“As we have observed over the past few months, the scope and severity and scale of some of these attacks was quite dramatically up. That is really driving this sense of urgency and focus that we have to address that,” DeRusha said on Ask the CIO. “When you look at the overall number of incidents in the federal report, though, it is also important to…
