Building a Safer Website with a New Name: ClarionCounty.Gov :: exploreClarion.com

CLARION, Pa. (EYT) – Improving security is a goal of a plan for Clarion County to change its Internet domain name to clarioncounty.gov from www.co.clarion.pa.us.

Along the way, some help is coming from the FBI and National Guard.

It may seem like a small change, but Clarion County Information Technology Director Chad Johnston (pictured above) told commissioners on Tuesday morning it is part of state and federal efforts to push everyone to change on a global level because they can provide a lot more security for the counties.

“We are working with partners and SISA (Forensic-driven Cybersecurity Experts & Solutions) and other collaborations to build more secure infrastructures for governments at the local and state level,” Johnston explained.

“The benefits of having a dot-gov domain is like brand awareness. It provides a piece of mind that if we send someone an e-mail that has a dot gov, they’re going to know it is coming through from a government agency.”

Johnston added that government domains often have phishing attacks and ransomware where a government or business information system can be held hostage if the IT system is locked down.

“The security of it gives us peace of mind plus anything attacking dot gov or anything that’s going to increase attacks on our current system. The FBI and all of the other governments are watching. They can watch over everybody and help improve cybersecurity and infrastructure security. We’ll get training and a lot more contacts through the FBI and National Guard.

“With all sorts of cyber-attacks, they are going to be able to send us video training and let us know what is actually out there hitting these domains, and it will help us to further understand what’s out there, as much as working with them to protect our domain and our e-mail addresses.”

The project is going to take a while and will start out small, probably first within the IT Department for the change to clarioncounty.gov, according to Johnston.

“We’re going to make it work, and then we will eventually migrate up through the county system. It’s probably going to be a six- or eight-month process because we also have to send in our registration forms for approval….