Resources to Get Your Agency Across the NIBRS Transition Finish Line

Considerable inconsistency traditionally has existed in terms of how law enforcement agencies from coast to coast gather and report crime data, as well as the types of data captured. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) was created to address that shortcoming.

NIBRS has defined standard ways of describing an incident, and collecting the data associated with it, so that apples-to-apples comparisons can be made at the national level. The idea is that, to truly have a national picture of crime in the U.S., data has to be collected in the same manner, using the same nomenclature, from the country’s largest law-enforcement agency—the New York City Police Department—to its smallest.

Georgia Criminal Justice System Realizes Faster Case Processing and More Informed Decision-Making with Statewide CJEP Project

When the Georgia Governor's Office charged a team of criminal justice stakeholders with accessing the efficiencies that could be gained from electronic court filing, statewide criminal justice stakeholders set out to find ways in which documents and information could be seamlessly shared between systems. The State’s goal to improve criminal-history disposition match rates quickly expanded to the realization that real, sustainable statewide improvements would significantly improve the flow of justice information from the beginning to the end of the criminal case lifecycle. At that time, the administration was determined to improve the performance of the state’s criminal justice system to better protect public safety and control spending.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Vector Multicast Routing Protocol

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Major ‘Vishing’ Campaign

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

How Mission-Critical Organizations Can Leverage Penetration Testing to Protect Against Cyberattacks

Amid efforts to expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a network before an attacker does, penetration testing, also referred to as a pen test or a white-hat attack, continues to gain momentum as a viable means to detect weaknesses in an organization’s network infrastructure.

If the term penetration testing is foreign to you, it is not as intrusive as it sounds. The objective of a penetration test is to provide information technology (IT) and system managers with critically needed intelligence regarding their organization’s security vulnerabilities. Whether the testing is performed manually or via sophisticated automation tools, it is best conducted by a third party that can use the same tools many hackers rely on. Many of these tools are widely available, arming testers with a better understanding of how they can be used to attack an organization.

An Effective Way to Improve Evidence Management

An axiom within the criminal-justice community is that the more evidence that can be captured and leveraged by the prosecution, the better. Corollary to that axiom, however, is that evidence—regardless of type or quantity—has no utility if it is not easily accessed and shared, or worse, somehow falls through the cracks. The way to prevent such problems from occurring is to deploy a digital evidence management solution, or DEMS.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Windows DNS Servers

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the mission-critical community’s immediate attention.

Why Critical Infrastructure Agencies Should Monitor for Exposed Credentials

The average number of breached data records, including credentials, per U.S.-based company, is an astounding number—28,500.

Public Safety Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Cisco WebEx Vulnerability

As part of our ongoing effort to keep our clients informed about the latest cybersecurity threats, we issue advisories whenever new threats are detected. If you would like to receive such advisories in the future, update your preferences here. 

If You Do Nothing Else, Implement Multifactor Authentication to Head Off Cyberattacks

MCP’s NetInform solution leverages a variety of tools that enable our subject-matter experts to assess our clients’ communications network security postures. That assessment includes looking for vulnerabilities that could allow a bad actor to gain access to the network and then navigate through it, seeking opportunities to perform cyberattacks. Typically, a lot of vulnerabilities exist, and they’re not always easy to see. It can be something as simple as a network port being left open by a service technician after the work is done, or a former employee’s account is still active long after they left. This is problematic because numerous, easy-to-use scanning programs are readily available to hackers that enable them to probe an organization’s network to discover every open port, i.e., breach point, and attempt access.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Hackers Still Are Exploiting COVID-19

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their mission-critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the mission-critical community’s immediate attention.

Advisory Summary

Hacking groups still are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to perform cyberattacks. The United States’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a joint alert regarding the threats. To combat these threats, their recommendations are focused on user training and good cyber hygiene. A comprehensive list of recommendations to mitigate the risk can be found on the CISA website.

Why COOP/DR Plans Need to Consider GIS Data Maintenance

A couple of weeks ago, MCP’s Richard Gaston posted about why it is critically important for every public-safety agency, regardless of size and resources, to have continuity-of-operations plans (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans in place. This post addresses an element that is lacking in many such plans, a gap that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus—geographic information system (GIS) data maintenance.

For decades, location of 911 callers was determined solely by querying the master street address guide (MSAG) and automatic location identification (ALI) tabular databases. About a quarter century ago, GIS-generated data entered the picture—quite literally—as computer-aided dispatch (GIS) system mapping applications began to leverage it to depict 911-caller locations on the map display on telecommunicators’ screens. In the Next Generation 911 (NG911) environment, GIS data will play an even bigger role, because geospatial data will replace MSAG and ALI data as the primary means of locating 911 callers.