Marin County Grand Jury
• 2024-2025
• Agency Response
Response to:
Cyberattacks: A Growing Threat to Marin Government
The Town of Corte Madera Marin County Civil Grand Jury Marin County California*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 6 findings
F1
Contracts for Information Technology, Information Systems, and Cybersecurity services between third-party providers and Marin County governmental agencies should contain a Business Continuity clause, or other language, protecting that agency from a sudden cessation of services provided by the third-party provider. Response: Agree.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
Marin agencies should require a current (executed within the last five years), competitively-bid, written contract which includes business continuity language for any third-party Information Technology services they use. Response: Recommendation number R1 has been implemented. This recommendation has already been implemented and will continue to evolve. The Town of Corte Madera's current contract with our third-party Information Technology and Cyber Security consulting firm includes business continuity language and an overview of continuity services. Although business continuity services are provided in our current contract, the Town has asked our third-party IT provider to clearly outline and expand our business continuity services during our contract renewal process.
F2
Marin County municipalities should have current, written contracts with third-party providers of Information Technology, Information Systems, and Cybersecurity services, and should not continue to use those providers' services without a current contract. Response: Agree.
No recommendations for this finding
F3
Membership in insurance risk pools provides the benefits of cybersecurity assessments and audits, which highlight cybersecurity deficiencies and make suggestions for improvement. Response: Agree.
No recommendations for this finding
F4
Having a completed, adopted and regularly updated cybersecurity plan helps ensure that all staff within a government agency are working together to optimize that organization's cyber preparedness and security. Response: Agree.
No recommendations for this finding
F5
Joint Powers Authorities in Marin County exist to provide more efficient and cost-effective services to the people of Marin. Response: Agree.
No recommendations for this finding
F6
The current County Collective Bargaining Agreements prevent the Marin County Department of Information Systems & Technology from unilaterally negotiating managed service agreements (outsourcing work to third parties). Response: Partially Disagree The Town of Corte Madera is not a member of the County of Marin's collective bargaining unit, nor does it operate within the constraints of their labor union contracts. Although the Town's response indicates "Partially Disagree," a more appropriate response is that finding F6 is not applicable to the Town of Corte Madera. ) RESPONSE TO GRAND JURY RECOMMENDATIONS
Related Recommendations (1)
R6
All Marin municipalities should: a) take all steps necessary to acquire an appropriate .gov or .ca.gov domain; Response: Recommendation number R6(a) has been implemented. The Town acquired cortemadera.gov domain in November of 2022. The cortemadera.gov domain has been active since that time with previously acquired domains cortemadera.org forwarding emails etc. to the cortemadera.gov domain by way of aliases. b) formulate and adopt a plan for rolling out a .gov or .ca.gov website and emails by the start of the 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. Response: Recommendation number R6(b) has been implemented. This recommendation has been implemented and will be complete by the start of the 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The Town of Corte Madera acquired its cortemadera.gov domain in November of 2022 and email account users have been using this domain since that time. The cortemadera gov domain is exclusively owned by the Town of Corte Madera. The Town is actively working with our website provider (CivicPlus) and our third-party consulting firm to transition our website address from cortemadera.org to cortemadera.gov. This transition will be complete by the end of this quarter and most certainly by the start of 2025-2026 Fiscal Year.
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.