Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last Friday requested that Maj. Gen. Donald Dunbar, adjutant general of Wisconsin, put the state’s National Guard cyber response teams on standby ahead of the midterm elections.

A majority of surveyed U.S. information and technology professionals–86 percent–are concerned about the public sector’s ability to conduct secure, reliable, and accurate elections, according to a new study from ISACA released today.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder announced Monday that the state will open two new cyber hubs at Northern Michigan University and University of Michigan-Flint. The cyber hubs are an extension of the Michigan Cyber Range, which the state described as “the nation’s largest unclassified cyber range.” The new locations will serve as a hub for security training and workforce development, and hosting events, exercises, and training classes.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), in partnership with Deloitte, today released its new cybersecurity study which argues CISOs need to launch three “bold initiatives” to ward off advanced cyber threats.

ODNI, DoJ, FBI, DHS Declare Election Interference ‘Top Priority’

A bipartisan group of three senators–Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ben Cardin, D-Md.–last week introduced Protect Our Elections Act, which aims “to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require states to take steps to ensure domestic ownership and control of election service providers.”

When it comes to cybersecurity, local governments can rely on established partnerships and a security culture that values improvement over punitive measures, said a panel of local IT officials and experts during an event hosted by the National Association of Counties (NACo) and the Public Technology Institute on Monday.

A new report from a group of Federal government and private sector experts details how “precision agriculture,” or agriculture that uses connected technology to improve efficiency, faces new cybersecurity threats and a low degree of awareness in the industry to combat them.

Cybersecurity training and education programs need to emphasize systems engineering perspectives in order to fully understand system vulnerabilities, said leaders from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during an Oct. 10 webinar hosted by the agency’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE).

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee heard testimony today detailing the workings of data privacy laws in Europe and California–specifically the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)–amid a growing groundswell for Congress to work on a national data privacy law for the U.S.