It was announced today that state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government organizations in the United States are to receive extra support to improve their cybersecurity.
Help is coming in the form of a 12-month project funded by CISA that will enable SLTT security teams to boost their cyber-defenses with an additional layer of secure Domain Name System (DNS) security.
The US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has joined forces with Akamai and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to offer SLTTs fully managed proactive domain security.
The Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting (MDBR) service will help SLTTs to better protect their applications accessing web servers and external mail servers, and to enhance their existing network defenses.
MDBR technology acts as a blocker, limiting the risk of infections associated with malware, ransomware, and phishing by preventing IT systems from connecting to malicious web domains.
The service also staves off attacks by stopping malicious actions from communicating with their associated command and control server or domain.
"The MDBR service is based on proven, effective, and easy-to-deploy technology that is designed to quickly help SLTT security teams improve their current security defenses," said Patrick Sullivan, VP and CTO of security strategy at Akamai.
"The real-time threat intelligence in MDBR is based on Akamai's unprecedented global visibility into web and DNS traffic, which is key to enable us to proactively defend against today's evolving threat landscape that SLTT security teams face."
Under the project, the MDBR service will be available at no cost to members of the CIS Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC®).
"MDBR is built on top of Akamai's Enterprise Threat Protector (ETP) service, which is deployed on its platform that provides carrier-grade recursive DNS service," said Ed Mattison, CIS executive vice president of operations and security services.
"The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform delivers up to 2.2 trillion DNS queries daily, making it a great partner for this initiative."
To use the service, an organization just has to spend a few minutes pointing its DNS requests to Akamai's DNS servers.