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Municipal technology systems help keep essential services running, from public safety and utilities to transportation, permitting and emergency response. But many local governments must manage growing digital demands while relying on aging infrastructure, limited budgets and systems that weren’t designed for today’s security threats. Even a seemingly minor weakness can create risks that extend well beyond the IT department.
Municipal leaders need a clear understanding of where those weaknesses may be hiding and what could happen if they’re left unresolved. Here, members of Forbes Technology Council examine common vulnerabilities in municipal systems and explain why addressing them is critical to protecting public services, community trust and long-term resilience.
Overreliance On Automated Decision-Making
A hidden vulnerability is over-trusted automation in municipal systems. Leaders focus on hackers but forget that bad rules, outdated data or unchecked AI can quietly deny permits, misroute services or flag residents unfairly. If ignored, the damage is not only technical; people lose faith that local government is fair, human and accountable. - Margarita Simonova, ILoveMyQA
Unmonitored Third-Party Vendor Access
The blind spot most leaders miss: third-party vendors with privileged access to municipal networks, often completely off security’s radar. You can’t defend what you can’t see. Left unchecked, one compromised vendor can cascade into critical infrastructure failure and broken public trust. Consolidated threat visibility and preemptive defense aren’t optional anymore. - Kumar Ritesh, CYFIRMA
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Flawed Technology Procurement Practices
The deepest vulnerability sits upstream of any system: how cities buy technology. Procurement rewards the cheapest compliant bid, so the unpatched, unsupported systems everyone worries about are exactly what the buying process keeps choosing. Until cities change how they purchase, they will keep manufacturing the same exposure, year after year, no matter how many breaches they clean up. - Anna Drobakha, Groupe SEB
Fragmented Municipal Data Ownership
Municipal data sits in disconnected departmental silos with no shared lineage or owner. Each system holds a partial citizen record; none holds the truth. When an emergency or audit demands one reconciled view, no one can produce it fast or defensibly. The vulnerability is not the breach. It is that no one can prove what the data says. - Leon Gordon, Onyx Data
Inconsistent Security Standards Across Departments
The biggest vulnerability is inconsistent cybersecurity across departments. Municipalities are complex organizations, and attackers only need to find the weakest link. Leaders should centralize vulnerability management and apply the same security standards everywhere. Otherwise, a small gap in one department can disrupt essential public services across the entire municipality. - Alex Spokoiny, Check Point Software
Weak Credentials For Critical Systems
Modern municipal systems make utilities, water and public services more efficient, but internet-exposed operational technology is often guarded by weak, shared or default credentials. One neglected password can escalate into a drinking-water threat, a public trust crisis, or a failure of civic stewardship. - Erik Wittreich, Veilant
Cybersecurity’s Isolation Within IT
A common mistake is viewing cybersecurity as something only the technology department owns. In reality, a successful attack can disrupt transportation, utilities, healthcare and public administration. The risk is organizational, not technical. - Benedetto Biondi, Folks Finance
Unmanaged System Interdependencies
Within municipality systems, no technology operates as an island. Through their design, municipality systems have both upstream and downstream connections. A failure to plan for those connections at both an infrastructure and application level can have significant impacts on critical infrastructure and operations that can result in widespread failure to deliver public services. Anticipating system connectivity is key to the pathway to municipal resilience. - Mark Brown, The Mark of Security Ltd.
Unpatched Legacy Systems
Unpatched legacy systems are one of the most common and costly weak points in municipal networks. Older software with poor segmentation is an easy target for ransomware and data theft. And when city infrastructure goes down, it’s not just an IT problem. Public services stall, trust erodes and taxpayers feel it. - Harsh Jangid, Coozmoo Digital Solutions
Aging Municipal Energy Infrastructure
Many municipal systems have gone decades without meaningful modernization of aging energy infrastructure, which becomes more costly and disruptive over time. This is not for lack of attention but due to competing priorities and tight budgets. Models such as energy savings performance contracts are one of the most effective ways to modernize aging infrastructure with little to no upfront capital. - George Sakellaris, Ameresco
Unclear Security Accountability
The issue isn’t one vulnerability; it’s organizational. Security is treated as a cost center rather than a governance priority, and accountability is spread so thin that no single person owns the risk. Patching individual vulnerabilities is like replacing shingles on a decaying roof. The real fix is enforcing personal accountability. When people know the risk belongs to them, they change behavior quickly. - Adriel Desautels, Netragard
Inadequate Protections For Sensitive Data
Typically, municipalities are not equipped to store and protect the sensitive data they collect, which, if lost, could have devastating consequences on broader communities. With increasingly sophisticated AI attacks, municipalities’ tight budgets and outdated backup systems are leaving their data out in the open for bad actors to take. Upgrading to immutable storage will give them the advantage they need to protect their citizens and recover data. - David Bennett, Object First
A Lack Of Communications Redundancy
In recent years, everyone has gone to M365 for collaboration and even phone calls, but with current fears of the breakdown of data centers, you need to have a backup when infrastructure is no longer working. Most municipal systems are not redundant, which means when there is a failure of a data center, they cannot communicate anymore. - Thomas Berndorfer, Connecting Software
Unreliable Data Across Platforms
A quieter but serious vulnerability is data integrity. Member and resident records flow across multiple vendors, and small reconciliation gaps build up unnoticed over years. Leaders need to ensure the data they hold and the data moving across vendors is accurate in the first place. People get denied benefits, misrouted or wrongly flagged, and no breach ever triggers an alarm. It erodes the one thing public-serving systems run on: trust that the records are accurate. - Shubhangi Srivastava, NEP SERVICES
Lost Institutional Knowledge
One overlooked vulnerability is the absence of operational knowledge continuity. Many municipal processes rely on a handful of long-serving employees whose undocumented expertise keeps critical services running. When they retire, leave or become unavailable, systems fail in unexpected ways. The consequence is not just downtime but institutional paralysis, where recovery is delayed because nobody knows how things truly work. - Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen Infotech
Outdated Vendor Access Privileges
Outdated vendor access is the vulnerability nobody talks about. Third-party contractors get remote credentials, and nobody follows up—there’s no expiration, no monitoring and no patching. Those doors stay open for years. When something goes wrong, it looks like someone walking in through an entrance we forgot to close. Treat vendor access governance the same way you treat internal controls, or eventually you’ll be explaining to the public why you didn’t. - Ganesh Ariyur, Transform Smarter
Underused Technology Investments
As a former municipal lobbyist, I would say that municipalities need to focus less on acquiring the new technology of the day and more on better utilizing the technology they already have. Usage is suboptimal, and analytics are almost nonexistent. - Frank Carnevale, iGreenTree Inc.
AI-Enhanced Email Threats
Email-based attacks remain one of the most exploited entry points into municipal systems, including phishing and business email compromise attacks that prey on human behavior, not just technical gaps. Legacy defenses miss these AI-crafted threats, and when unaddressed, the fallout can lead to ransomware, disrupted public services, exposed citizen data and eroded community trust that’s hard to rebuild. - Mike Britton, Abnormal AI
Insecure Access Workarounds
One of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in municipal systems is access friction. When employees, contractors and first responders struggle to securely access critical applications or data, workarounds inevitably emerge that expand attack surfaces and create operational risk. When unaddressed, a single access failure can disrupt emergency response, public safety and essential services. - Fran Rosch, Imprivata
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