Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike announced this week that it is partnering with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to provide a slate of security services to US State, Local, Tribal and Territorial (SLTT) governments. 

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CIS has been working for years to democratize cybersecurity protection through a variety of programs that provide free or low-cost tools to hospitals, schools and more. 

The new CIS Endpoint Security Services (ESS) platform, which is backed by Crowdstrike's tools, is built to identify, detect and respond to security alerts from local governments. 

Through CrowdStrike's Falcon system, the company will offer ESS users deployments onto endpoint devices. The platform provides antivirus solutions, endpoint detection and response, asset and software inventory, USB device monitoring, user account monitoring and host-based firewall management.

CIS has previously worked with CrowdStrike on their Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center project. The latest partnership will see them provide "a new, fully managed 24/7/365 next-generation cybersecurity offering exclusively tailored to SLTT organizations, including more than 12,000 Multi-State Information and Analysis Center members across the US, with more than 14 million endpoints in total."

Ed Mattison, CIS executive vice president of operations and security services, said organizations who purchase ESS to protect their devices will be receiving "the combined benefit of CrowdStrike's superior endpoint protection technology and the CIS Security Operations Center's world-class expertise to help defend against sophisticated cyber threats at the device level."

CrowdStrike vice president of public sector and healthcare James Yeager said CIS had been a longtime partner with their company and that the two have always been aligned on initiatives to drive innovation into security programs across US SLTT organizations.

"As the leader in endpoint security, we are thrilled to expand upon our partnership with CIS's new ESS solution, marrying their fully managed 24/7/365 services with our industry-leading endpoint and workload protection capabilities to provide state, local, tribal and territorial governments the cyber protection they need," Yeager said. 

Earlier this year, CIS announced the creation of the Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting Service, a no-cost ransomware protection service for private hospitals in the US that may not be able to afford a robust cybersecurity service. 

The program originally started last year as an offering to K-12 schools as well as state and county governments, signing up about 2,000 organizations ranging from kindergartens to the DMV. But the service was expanded this year to hospitals once it was found to be effective, blocking almost 800 million malicious intrusion attempts so far.

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