On March 21, students from the St. Cloud State’s Forensics class met with cybersecurity professionals from Minnesota IT Services (MNIT). The students toured the State of Minnesota’s Security Forensics Lab and the Security Operations Center (SOC).

MNIT’s Forensics division supports State of Minnesota agencies, boards, and commissions, and assists with law enforcement and other government organizations to protect Minnesotans from cyber-threats. They work closely with MNIT’s Security Operations Center (SOC) in evaluating, remediating, and investigating incidents such as compromised networks and user accounts, misconfigured systems, malware infections, and much more.

The MNIT security team talked with the students about the state of cybersecurity in Minnesota, the threats we face, and how we handle them.

What type of threats and challenges does the State of Minnesota face?

The State of Minnesota’s systems are probed and scanned more than 3 million times each day. Most of the time those seeking to gain unauthorized access to state systems are reaching for the low hanging fruit, looking for account information through email scams like phishing. Phishing can occur over email when a scammer uses fraudulent messages to get you to share personal information such as account passwords or other credentials. Emails may also have attachments or links that can contain malware. Opening or clicking these infected attachments and links can let the attackers past any defenses you might have. Educating our employees on how to spot and report suspicious emails helps protect the data in state systems. Learn more about how to protect yourself from email attacks in our /mnit/about-mnit/security/index.jspsecurity section.

Another challenge is that technology and business needs are always changing. As the technology we use changes, we work to ensure it is secure. Working with our business partners so they know exactly what information and technology they have, what the security risks are, and how their business decisions and investments impact those risks. Knowing agency business needs and constraints allows MNIT to reprioritize, escalate or postpone IT projects, making us more effective and efficient business partners.

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