Let's talk about a problem that’s been nagging at me. It’s one of those slow-burn issues that sits in the back of your mind until one day, it flashes into sharp focus. For me, that day was a few weeks ago.

Tired of This Recurring Problem

I was trying to look up some information on the Pennsylvania Attorney General's website. Standard stuff. But I hit a 404. Then a timeout. Then a server error. My first thought, like any of us in the field, was probably the same as yours: routine maintenance, a server reboot, maybe a clumsy 'push to prod' on a Friday afternoon. We've all been there. I closed the tab and figured I’d check back later.

But "later" came and went. A full day passed, and the site was still dark. That’s when the professional curiosity turned into civic concern. A quick search brought up the news: the entire network for the state's top cops hadn't just tripped over a power cord; it had been taken hostage by a ransomware attack.

It wasn't just a website that was down; it was a fundamental piece of our civic infrastructure. Phones, email, the digital front door to the Commonwealth's chief law enforcement office—all of it, gone. And that’s what got me thinking. If their firewall is this porous, what does the rest of the state's network topology really look like? It feels less like a secure, modern government cloud and more like a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island problem—a complex, aging system with hidden vulnerabilities, just waiting for the right combination of failures to cascade into a full-blown meltdown. This isn't just an IT issue; it's a crisis of public trust waiting to happen. There must be a better way.

Let's Define the Goal

This is the kind of problem we, as technology professionals, are uniquely equipped to understand and solve. It’s not about blame; it's about process. This is a classic opportunity for what I call a small-scale Digital Transformation, and it starts with analyzing the flawed upstream process that allows these things to happen in the first place.

The root cause isn't a single unpatched server or one employee clicking a phishing link. The real, systemic failure is how our public digital assets are perceived and managed. For decades, government IT has often been treated as a cost center, a glorified communications department responsible for "the website." It’s seen as a utility, like electricity, that you only think about when it's not working.

This is a fundamentally broken model.

The upstream process is one of Reactive IT Management. A system is built, an application is deployed, and then it's largely left alone until it breaks or is breached. Security is a checklist item, not a foundational principle. Budgets are allocated for visible new features, not for the unglamorous, essential work of maintaining, securing, and hardening the underlying infrastructure.

This creates a vicious cycle. When a breach inevitably occurs, public confidence plummets. This "trust deficit" becomes its own vulnerability. Citizens become reluctant to use online government services, fearing their data is at risk. This low adoption rate then makes it harder for agencies to justify investment in improving those very systems. The result is digital decay, leaving our public infrastructure brittle, insecure, and perpetually vulnerable. The problem isn't the ransomware attack; the problem is the systemic fragility that made the attack so devastating.

Goal Definition

We need to shift from "Reactive IT Management" to Proactive Digital Stewardship. Our goal must be to reframe our public digital services and APIs not as websites or back-office tools, but as essential public utilities—as critical to our 21st-century Commonwealth as our roads, bridges, and power grids. The desired outcome is a resilient, secure, and trustworthy digital infrastructure that fosters public confidence and encourages civic engagement.

First Iteration

To make this goal tangible, let's write a simple user story from the perspective of the people we serve. This helps us crystallize the need before we even think about specific technologies.

This story isn't about features. It's about a fundamental promise: the promise of security and reliability. Now that we know what we need, we can look for the right tools and methodologies.

I’ve found that the best solution here isn't a single product you can buy off a shelf. The "new technology" we must implement is a holistic Digital Transformation mindset for our public sector, built on modern architectural principles.

Let's break down what that actually means in practice:

1. Embrace a Zero Trust Architecture: The old model of a strong perimeter firewall (a castle with a moat) is dead. The reality is that threats are already inside the network, and every agency network is interconnected. A Zero Trust model assumes no user or device is trusted by default, whether inside or outside the network. Access to any application or data store must be continuously verified. This means modernizing identity and access management (IAM), implementing multi-factor authentication everywhere, and segmenting networks so that a breach in one agency (like the AG’s office) can't easily spread to another (like the Department of Revenue or PennDOT).

2. Treat Public APIs as Secure Products, Not Endpoints: Our government runs on data. The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow different systems to talk to each other are the pipes and wires of this digital government. When they are poorly designed, undocumented, and unsecured, they are not just leaky pipes; they are gaping security holes. Each API should be treated as a product with a clear owner, strong authentication, rate limiting to prevent abuse, and robust logging and monitoring. An unmanaged public API is an open invitation for data scraping and exploitation. We need a central API gateway strategy for the entire Commonwealth, not an ad-hoc collection of forgotten endpoints.

3. Shift from Prevention to Resilience: Prevention is important, but in today's threat landscape, we must assume a breach will happen. The real measure of a system's strength is its resilience—its ability to withstand an attack, contain the damage, and recover quickly. This is the lesson of Three Mile Island. The goal wasn't just to prevent a meltdown, but to have redundant systems and containment structures in place to limit the disaster when things went wrong. For our digital infrastructure, this means immutable backups, well-rehearsed incident response plans, and architectures that can isolate a compromised component without bringing down the entire system. The AG’s office being offline for days suggests a lack of resilience in their core design.

4. Radical Transparency as a Trust-Building Technology: The technology of a response matters as much as the security technology. When a breach occurs, a slow, opaque, jargon-filled response erodes public trust far more than the breach itself. A modern digital stewardship approach requires a plan for clear, prompt, and honest communication with the public. Admitting a failure, explaining the steps being taken to fix it, and providing clear guidance to affected citizens is the only way to begin rebuilding trust. Silence breeds suspicion.

This isn't a quick fix. It's a fundamental re-architecting of how we build, manage, and fund our shared digital spaces. It’s the necessary, difficult work of paying down years of technical debt.

The Rollout and the Feedback Loop

Of course, defining a new process is the easy part. The hard part is getting a large, complex organization—like a state government—to adopt it. We all know that a new tool or process is useless if the team won't embrace it. This is where the human side of technology comes into play.

You can't boil the ocean. A top-down mandate to "modernize everything now!" would collapse under its own weight, bogged down by bureaucracy and budget fights. The rollout needs to be strategic, starting with a low barrier to entry. I'd propose the creation of a small, empowered "Digital Services PA" team, modeled after the federal government's 18F or U.S. Digital Service. This team of skilled technologists wouldn't try to fix everything at once. Their first job would be to partner with a single, willing agency on a high-impact "lighthouse" project.

Maybe it's creating a truly unified, secure single sign-on for all citizen-facing services. Maybe it's rebuilding the digital front door for a critical service like unemployment benefits. By achieving a visible, concrete win, they would demonstrate the value of this new approach, creating a pull-effect where other agencies want to participate.

Critically, this team's mandate must include establishing an active feedback loop. They would not only help build new systems but also create public-facing dashboards on system uptime, security posture, and service performance. They would be responsible for conducting regular security audits and architectural reviews, providing agencies with actionable feedback. This creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Without a permanent, empowered body to maintain momentum and provide this feedback, this is just another improvement attempt that fails to gain any traction and withers on the vine.

The Central PA Pulse

It’s easy to think of these as abstract, far-away problems. But this is happening right here in our backyard, affecting organizations big and small. The digital decay is widespread, and it impacts our neighbors and our community institutions.

Local News

• State AG’s office investigating ransom attack that knocked out website, email and phone service

  • The initial incident that sparked this whole train of thought. The outage, which began on a Sunday, impacted the entire office, highlighting a critical lack of network segmentation and resilience in one of our most sensitive state agencies. It serves as a stark warning about the fragility of our core government systems.

• Central PA Food Bank attacked by Fog ransomware group

  • This hits even closer to home. A crucial non-profit, the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, was also targeted, with the Fog ransomware group claiming responsibility. This demonstrates that the threat isn't limited to government. Every organization that holds sensitive data or provides a critical service is a potential target, making community-wide digital resilience a shared responsibility.

What's Your Problem?

That's one problem down. We’ve defined it, scoped it, and outlined a path forward. It's a big one, but it's not unsolvable if we approach it with the right principles.

Now I'm curious, what’s the recurring problem you're tired of? That process failure, that piece of technical debt, that frustrating workflow that makes you think, "There has to be a better way."

Send me a note. Maybe we can figure out a Digital Transformation for it in a future dispatch.

Stay vigilant, Don

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