Recommendations to implement a cyber incident response plan in Oneida County, New York

The purpose of this research was to recommend and construct a local cyber-incident response plan for Oneida County to help mitigate the growing threat of cyber-attacks. The research focused on why Oneida County does not have a local cyber-incident response plan, what steps could be taken to create a plan, and how this plan could help to mitigate the growing threat of cyber-attacks. This research did not explicitly discover why Oneida County did not have a plan, but uncovered possible core issues: (a) financial constraints; (b) the mentality that cyber-attacks cannot transpire to local governments; and (c) the Director of Central Services did not have the knowledge to handle cyber-security related issues. The latter of the three was confirmed by legislation submitted by the Director of Central Services to Oneida County's Board of Legislators. The Active Cyber Defense Cycle strategy was introduced in this research to provide a methodology to detect, analyze, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks. Additionally, the ACDC method was integrated in the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center guideline when constructing the cyber-incident response plan, to keep within the desires of Oneida County.