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Commissioners hire Core Recon for cybersecurity assessment under SLGCP grant
Summary
The court approved a contract with Corpus Christi-based Core Recon to perform a county cybersecurity assessment using a state/local cybersecurity grant; Chief executive John Martinez presented the firm's capabilities.
The Jim Wells County Commissioner's Court voted Feb. 10 to hire Core Recon, a Corpus Christi cybersecurity firm, to perform a county cybersecurity assessment under the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLGCP) grant number 5175801.
John Martinez, founder and CEO of Core Recon, presented the company’s capabilities to the court, describing 24/7 security operations center monitoring, threat detection and response, dark-web scanning and endpoint protection. Martinez said Core Recon will provide monthly reports and work with county staff to identify end-of-life hardware and software and to deploy multi-factor authentication and other protections.
"I would say every single day, there's probably — we see probably about 800,000 attacks with all our clients in the state of Texas and outside of that," Martinez told the court.
For transparency, a county official stated on the record that the SLGCP grant awarded to the county was "$46,000 and change" and that the contract before the court was for "$44,000." The contract is for the assessment and evaluation phase; the county expects follow-up applications for grant funds to implement recommended changes and later to support ongoing maintenance.
Core Recon described services the county will receive under the grant: 24/7 monitoring through a security operations center, multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, dark-web scanning, web-application scanning, firewall and intrusion-detection work, device patching, virtual-private-network support for remote access and monthly reporting. Martinez gave background on the company and listed several security certifications the firm holds or is pursuing.
The court approved the motion to contract with Core Recon; the transcript shows a motion, a second and the judge saying "Motion carries," but it does not record an itemized roll-call tally.
Why it matters: The assessment is the first phase under a multi-step SLGCP process: assessment, implementation and ongoing maintenance. The work is intended to identify vulnerabilities in county systems and to reduce the county’s exposure to ransomware and data breaches. The grant and contract amounts were discussed on the record; the court approved the contract by voice vote.
