Benidorm will create a Cybersecurity Operations Center for the City Council

Benidorm City Council will have a Cybersecurity Operations Center in order to provide itself with some security services that guarantee the security of the infrastructures, communications and digital services provided as well as improve the prevention, detection and response capacities to cybersecurity incidents .

The Local Government Board (JGL) today approved the project, which will be financed by the Ministry of Territorial Policy with a subsidy included in the call for aid for digital transformation and modernization of the Administrations of local entities.

The procedure, as indicated in the proposal of the Councilor for Innovation, Aida García Mayor, will adopt “effective and proportionate measures to avoid fraud, corruption, conflict of interest or double financing, and will develop the actions that are necessary to fully comply and satisfaction of the obligations that correspond to the beneficiary entity ”.

Although Benidorm City Council turned out to be the best valued among the consistories of more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Valencian Community in the Audit of the basic Cybersecurity controls carried out in 2020 by the Sindicatura de Contados, the City Council is aware that "there is still a long way to go ”.

In fact, the audit placed Benidorm in first place in the compliance index for basic cybersecurity controls with 74.9% and also in the maturity index with 61.3%, ahead of the rest of the municipalities with a population of more than 50,000 inhabitants "which shows the current state and the awareness that we have in the City Council in this matter" has indicated the councilor.

However, the Department considers that there are aspects that can be improved and hence various actions have been proposed in this project. On the one hand, the installation of a ‘proxy’ that filters the internet browsing of the entire organization. On the other hand, the installation of a WAF (Web application firewall) to monitor the traffic of those who browse municipal web services in order to avoid malicious actions on their own assets.
Third, the deployment of a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is planned, a tool that integrates the significant services of the facility to detect possible malicious actions based on that information.

Finally, the project contemplates the installation of an EDR (Endpoint Detection Response) system, a system that is responsible for collecting all the information from the antivirus agents installed on the different machines and detecting malicious events, preparing for attacks or carrying out a forensic analysis after the incident.

The amount of the project has been calculated taking into account the maximum amount of aid that the City Council can receive, which is 262,081.33 euros, a price that is adjusted to the value of the approved project.