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News 12 Staff

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I'm John Craven. Welcome back to Power and Politics. Iran says the US will pay a heavy price if it strikes any more targets in the country. Last weekend, the Pentagon bombed 3 nuclear facilities in Iran. One way Iran could hit America is with a cyber attack on major infrastructure. So is Connecticut prepared? Mark Raymond is the state's chief information officer. He joins us now. So Mark, you know, Iran seems very, very far away, but the threats are very real here at home, right? Uh, absolutely. The power of the internet means that it doesn't matter how far away people are, uh, the open nature of it means it can be used and and is being used on to to attack us, you know, here at home every day. So what are the biggest threats out there? Well, you know, normally, uh, in everyday operation, you know, uh, adversary actors like nation states are in the business of doing 3 things. One, gathering intelligence about how we operate, to, you know, embarrassing someone, to making the, making us look bad, and 3, raising funds through fraud and ransomware, but when they're agitated, when things are happening like uh we see uh across the globe. Uh, at times they can use the information that they've gathered to create damage and chaos and and and that's really what we are guarding against in in times like this. So we're really talking about things like utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, right? At 100%, so electrical blackouts, uh, disruptions of water supplies, uh, you know, during the heat wave or a cold spell. You know it can can have critical and and life affecting uh damage and, and those opportunities to inflict harm by blocking access to some of those needed services or are the kinds of things that we're guarding against. So without getting into too much detail, how are bad actors able to infiltrate, say, a local water supply or Esource? Um, you know, a, a lot of times that comes along with, um, not having patched systems, you know, stealing people's, uh, passwords, uh, inserting themselves in the middle of a, a, uh, electronic conversation, there's lots of, um, efforts to find ways in, um, and so, you know, there are lots of things that we do and the utilities do to Um, check for vulnerabilities and and attempt to fight the other side of that battle to to keep things safer. So is Connecticut ready for a cyber attack? Ah That's a great question and one that's impossible to answer. I, I would say that we are as ready as we uh can have ever been, and we continue to improve. There's lots that we're doing, um, you know, in protecting, you know, both utilities and state governmental entities that help we we work quite often with. Um, local governments, we work with our partners like uh CISA, which is a federal agency to protect cybersecurity. We hold um a practice events, so we simulate these kinds of things so that we understand how to act when they if when and if they do happen. We recently had an exercise called Cyber Yankee, where we uh practiced hands on. Uh, along with their utilities and, and National Guard, um, participants and what would happen with a utility kind of disruption and several other, uh. Preparatory activities that, you know, we that help keep the state safe. So what, what can we do to harden the infrastructure? Well, the first is understanding what's supposed to be out there and how that it operates, uh, so that you know when anomalies occur. So that's, that's always the, the first activity is know what you have. Uh, the next is to understand the vulnerabilities and patch those things. The third is to train our people, uh, to understand when something anomalous is occurring. Uh, I would say that the next is having good backups, uh, in the event that something happens, uh, understanding, uh, how you would quickly restore and have things not be down for long periods of time. Um, and then one interesting thing we have right now is the ability, there's a state and local cyber grant program, uh, we're in the 2nd to 4 years where we can provide funding to local governments and critical infrastructure to improve. Uh, their, their defenses and responses. So there, you know, there's last year we gave out over $2 million this coming year, we have about $5.4 million to to spend, so. Uh, oftentimes finances keep people away from putting some of these improvements in place. All right, well, we will certainly be revisiting this issue unfortunately many times over the coming years. Glad you're on the case. Mark Raymond, Connecticut's chief information officer, thanks for being on today. Thank you, John. Have a great day. You too. All right, well, next on power and politics, do you work from home? You could be paying too many taxes and to the wrong state. We'll explain coming up.

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Welcome back. You know, on a hot week like this, lots of people worked from home. If you're one of them, a new state law could cut your tax bill by thousands of dollars. Jason Ruben is working from home. He lives in Ridgefield, but since Ruben's office is in Manhattan, he pays income taxes to New York even when he's not there. It cost him thousands of dollars each year. Well, the rates are higher in New York than they are in Connecticut. Now Connecticut wants remote workers to challenge their New York taxes. If you win, you'll get a hefty tax credit. So we passed Senate Bill 1558 in order to create an avenue for individuals to sue and hopefully be victorious against the. State of New York in court, Connecticut's tax commissioner says the state is losing out on nearly half a billion dollars. New York has been engaged in frankly, thuggery over the last 10 years of reaching across state lines and grabbing into the pocketbooks of the working men and women of the state. For Jason Rubin, the tax savings aren't enough to take on the challenge himself, but at the end of the day, if it works for the higher income earners, it'll it'll trickle down to the lower income people as well. It's a cross border tax battle that could save you a lot of money. Now we did reach out to New York state leaders, but they did not respond. By the way, New Jersey just passed a similar law and taxpayers are already suing New York and Massachusetts. That's all of our time for this week. Mark Sudall will be back next week. Thanks for watching and have a great weekend.

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