Norris, DonaldMateczun, LauraJoshi, AnupamFinin, Tim2019-05-312019-05-312017-06-12Donald Norris, et.al, Cybersecurity Challenges to American Local Governments, Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Digital Government, 2017, https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/811/Cybersecurity-Challenges-to-American-Local-Governmentshttp://hdl.handle.net/11603/1399117th European Conference on Digital Government.In this paper we examine data from the first ever nationwide survey of cybersecurity among American local governments. We are particularly interested in understanding the threats to local government cybersecurity, their level of preparedness to address the threats, the barriers these governments encounter when deploying cybersecurity, the policies, tools and practices that they employ to improve cybersecurity and, finally, the extent of awareness of and support for high levels of cybersecurity within their organizations. We found that local governments are under fairly constant cyberattack and are periodically breached. They are not especially well prepared to prevent cyberattacks or to recover when breached. The principal barriers to local cybersecurity are financial and organizations. Although a number of polices, tools and practices to improve cybersecurity, few local governments are making wide use of them. Last, local governments suffer from too little awareness of and support for cybersecurity within their organizations8 pagesen-USThis item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.Cybersecuritycybersecurity barriercybersecurity policiespractices and toolslocal government cybersecuritylocal government cyberattacklocal government cyber incidentlocal government data breachUMBC Ebiquity Research GroupText