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Seattle and Washington officials pledge practical help for nonprofits’ cybersecurity, hand out YubiKeys
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Summary
Seattle and state officials at a CLTC convening pledged templates, incident-playbooks and resource-sharing for nonprofits; the City of Seattle is distributing free YubiKeys as an immediate MFA step and officials urged contract language and grant use to extend protections.
Seattle and Washington state officials told nonprofit attendees they intend to expand practical, no‑cost support after UC Berkeley CLTC’s presentation showing high cyberattack rates among nonprofits.
Bill Kehoe, Washington state CIO and director of WATEC, said the state must treat nonprofits that hold resident data with similar attention to small state agencies: "If you have a breach, that's an extension of us," Kehoe said, calling for clear contract language and sharing of resources so nonprofit partners can access monitoring, audit and security tools.
Jake Hammock, chief information security officer for the City of Seattle, described immediate, practical steps the city is offering: free YubiKeys available at the event to enable hardware-based MFA and promises of templates and playbooks for incident response and notification. "We’ll give you a whole Rolodex...who you call if there's an incident," Hammock said, urging workshop-style readiness exercises and university partnerships for training.
Council President Joy Hollingsworth framed the issue as civic: nonprofits are the "front porch" of city services and the council is considering budget items to support technology and cybersecurity in nonprofit partners' work. "We're thinking about that" in budgeting and can help with connections to pro bono assistance or council budget actions, Hollingsworth said.
Panelists emphasized that phishing and business‑email compromise are common vectors and that nonprofits often lack the staff and procurement power to secure resilient systems. Kehoe and Hammock urged solution transference—local governments and agencies pooling purchasing power, providing shared managed services, and including readiness funding or technical assistance in contracts—rather than leaving each small nonprofit to fend for itself.
No formal government program change was enacted at the convening; panelists and city staff encouraged nonprofits to take immediate steps (accept donated YubiKeys, run OSINT scans on domains, and sign up for available pro bono services) and said governments would pursue policy and contracting approaches in follow-up work.
