The recent cyberattack on the City of Saint Paul has been particularly sobering for our team here at Senserva. When you read about these incidents in national headlines, it's easy to think "that's unfortunate" and move on to the next story. But when it's happening in your own backyard—when the municipal services you rely on are shut down, when it's affecting your neighbors and the local businesses you frequent—the impact becomes deeply personal.
I've driven past Saint Paul City Hall twice this week, I can't help but think about the IT and security professionals inside, likely working around the clock to restore critical systems. These are dedicated public servants tasked with protecting essential community infrastructure, often with limited budgets, aging systems, and the kind of resource constraints that most organizations face every day.
This incident serves as a stark reminder that cybersecurity isn't an abstract problem—it's about community resilience. When critical infrastructure goes down, it affects everyone: residents trying to access city services, businesses processing permits, and the countless daily interactions that keep our communities functioning.
What strikes me most about incidents like Saint Paul's is how they illustrate a fundamental truth we see constantly in our work at Senserva: cybersecurity isn't about building perfect defenses. It's about maintaining visibility into how your defenses change over time.
Think of it this way—cybersecurity is like building a solid brick wall with 10,000 bricks. You can do an excellent job laying that foundation, but over time, things shift. Policies get exceptions. "Temporary" workarounds become permanent. Configurations drift from their secure baselines. Each individual change might seem reasonable in isolation, but collectively they can create vulnerabilities that attackers are specifically looking for.
The challenging reality is that bad actors only need to find that one missing brick.
This is particularly relevant for organizations like municipalities, mid-sized businesses, and nonprofits—what we call "the 90 percent" of organizations that don't have Fortune 500 security budgets or dedicated teams of specialists. These organizations often focus their limited resources on building that initial security wall, but they lack visibility into how that wall changes over time.
Configuration drift—the gradual deviation of security settings from their intended baselines—is one of the most overlooked aspects of cybersecurity. It's not dramatic like a malware attack, but it's incredibly dangerous because it happens silently, often without anyone noticing until it's too late.
At Senserva, we've built our entire platform around this challenge. Our configuration drift management solution continuously monitors Microsoft environments to detect when security settings have changed from approved baselines. But more importantly, it provides automated remediation to get organizations back to a secure posture quickly.
The Saint Paul incident offers important lessons for organizations of all sizes:
Resource constraints are universal. Whether you're a municipality, a growing business, or a nonprofit, you're likely working with limited IT budgets and staff. The key is making those resources as effective as possible through automation and continuous monitoring.
Small changes have big consequences. Major security breaches rarely happen overnight. They're usually the result of gradual degradation in security posture—a death by a thousand small cuts that could have been prevented with better visibility.
Community support matters. The Twin Cities cybersecurity community has rallied around Saint Paul during this crisis. As security professionals, we're strongest when we support each other and share knowledge about emerging threats and defensive strategies.
While we don't have inside knowledge of what specifically happened in Saint Paul, we know that incidents like these are preventable with the right approach to security hygiene. Organizations need solutions that work within their resource constraints while providing enterprise-level protection.
This is exactly why Senserva exists. We founded our company on the belief that every organization—regardless of size or budget—deserves access to sophisticated security automation. Our Minneapolis-based team understands the challenges that local organizations face because we face them ourselves.
If the Saint Paul incident has prompted you to evaluate your own organization's security posture, here are some immediate steps you can take:
At Senserva, we're offering complimentary security assessments to help Twin Cities organizations understand their current configuration risk. Our founder Mark Shavlik is also providing brief consultations to discuss practical approaches to configuration management.
The Saint Paul cyberattack is a reminder that cybersecurity is ultimately about protecting the communities and organizations we care about. As local business leaders and security professionals, we have a responsibility to help our neighbors become more resilient against these threats.
Our hearts go out to the Saint Paul team as they work through recovery. The cybersecurity community is strongest when we support each other through difficult moments like these.
If you're interested in learning more about configuration drift management or want to discuss practical security strategies for your organization, we're here to help. Because when it comes to protecting our community, we're all in this together.