Last updated: October 20, 2026
Utility payments and payroll runs pass through your finance office, along with residents’ account and payment details. Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a good time to look at how attackers go after that data and how Caselle protects it, whether you host in the cloud or on your own servers.
Why local governments are targets
Your office holds financial records and resident data, and IT support is often shared across departments or contracted out. Attackers usually get in through an unpatched system or a convincing email, then follow with ransomware or payment fraud.
The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report found that Government Facilities was among the sectors most affected by the top reported ransomware variants in 2025. Those figures only count complaints reported to the FBI, and some victims never report a loss amount, so the real numbers are likely higher.
A fraudulent payment request can look like any other email in your inbox. The same report notes that an Oregon city government office reported a business email compromise loss of over $6 million in April 2025. The bank was able to recall the wire, but the payment had already gone out.
Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report points to the same entry points. In its public administration data, breaches most often started with exploited vulnerabilities (40 percent) or phishing (20 percent), and the human element was involved in 69 percent of them.
Three principles behind data security
Security teams measure protection against three principles: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Confidentiality ensures that sensitive data is only accessible to authorized users.
- Integrity means that information stays accurate and trustworthy, without unauthorized changes.
- Availability means your systems and data are ready when your team needs them.
If your finance office doesn’t have a security team on staff, the software itself has to hold up when a password is stolen or a database is exposed. The safeguards below focus on keeping your data in the right hands.
Extra protection with multi-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires more than a password to log in, so a stolen password alone isn’t enough to get into your system. If your office uses Caselle’s cloud hosting, MFA is part of every sign-in. You can verify your identity through an authenticator app on your smartphone or a FIDO2 YubiKey, a small hardware device designed for secure access.
The YubiKey option matters because phishing is a common way in. CISA’s guidance on phishing-resistant MFA calls it the “gold standard” and notes that FIDO/WebAuthn authentication is the only widely available form of it.
Caselle manages MFA for cloud-hosted customers, so your team doesn’t have to set it up or maintain it in-house. The same goes for testing and patching: Caselle runs weekly vulnerability tests on Caselle Cloud systems, contracts with LMG Security for third-party penetration testing, and expedites critical security patches.
Secure sign-in for on-premise customers
If you host Caselle on your own servers, you can use Active Directory single sign-on (SSO). Your staff log in with the network credentials they already use, so there’s one less password to manage.
You keep control through your own Active Directory, so access rules stay in one place. If your team is weighing a move from on-premise to the cloud, the choice is yours, and Caselle supports both setups.
Strong encryption for sensitive data
Caselle also protects your data behind the scenes with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the federal standard NIST publishes as FIPS 197. If a database were stolen, the information inside would be unreadable without the encryption keys.
AES is a standard part of how Caselle protects your general ledger and financial records.
Security you can count on
Residents trust you with their payment and account data. In the cloud or on your own servers, Caselle’s safeguards are built to protect it.
Want to add YubiKeys for your team or set up single sign-on? Contact Caselle to talk through the right setup for your office.
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