What the MSP alert means for local governments

Organizations that depend on managed service providers for their IT needs got a wake-up call Wednesday when cybersecurity agencies from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand published a joint alert warning of stepped-up aggression by malicious actors targeting those vendors.

Local governments across the U.S. rely on MSPs for a range of functions, but over the past few years, many localities have become just as familiar with ransomware attacks that begin when a criminal actor targets a service provider, eventually compromising that company’s government clients.