Townships seek cybersecurity funds in wake of Bazetta’s loss

Hubbard, Liberty want to make website domain more secure

HUBBARD TOWNSHIP -- Trustees said Bazetta Township losing money over eight transactions through a phishing scam was the motivation for applying for cybersecurity grant software packages through the state.

"They weren’t even hacked. They just had somebody send to the county a new bank account number, and the county sent them $160,000," Trustee Jason Tedrow said at a meeting earlier this month. "So speaking of tax dollars, (they) gave away $160,000 to somebody we don’t even know at this point."

Bazetta's fiscal officer in August discovered there were up to eight transactions totaling $160,857 that were intercepted by an unknown party. Trumbull County Sheriff Paul Monroe later said law enforcement was able to recover some, but not all, of the funds.

The county's auditor and Bazetta trustees have hired legal counsel to represent them in the matter because half of the funds still are missing.

The first grant, which Hubbard Trustee William Colletta applied for earlier this month, is a cyber security software grant for $10,800.

The second of the two grants is a mitigation grant totaling $5,852, which will make the township's web pages change from their .us domain to .gov.

While .us domains can be registered by anyone, including private entities for a fee and is managed by Registry Services LLC, on behalf of the United States Department of Commerce, .gov domains are free and only available to government organizations within the U.S.

They also can only be registered via an authorization letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The state cybersecurity grant was publicized earlier this year, when Gov. Mike DeWine announced $7 million in funding through CyberOhio to assist townships with cybersecurity software and services to boost their preparedness and resilience. Eligible security software and services included endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication and secure mail, as well as vulnerability management.

Colletta said the representative from Team Office Technologies in Youngstown told him the state plans to introduce a mandate for government agencies to come up with a similar security system.

"We're not ahead of the game, but we're in good shape because we just started to secure our emails with him (the representative), so hopefully we'll be able to further it," Colletta said.

Hubbard isn't the only township looking to bolster its online presence.

Liberty Township Fiscal Officer Matthew Connelly said they received an email from the state a month prior about the grant, but their interest and decision coincidentally lined up with the incident.

Connelly said he's only received one phishing email a year in his three-year tenure with the township, but he can point them out because the state recently made all employees go through fraud training via the auditor's office.

Connelly, who applied for the grant with the help of the township's I.T. specialist Joel Davis earlier in the month, said it will take 30 days to know if they have received money. He expects them to receive $29,500 from both grants they applied for, but they've approximated the costs to total $25,000.

"We said the costs were going to be approximately $25,000 to do this township-wide; all the print material - our letterhead, all our business cards, things like that have to change from .com to .gov," Connelly said.