Creating a secured digital municipality for citizens’ safety

Background

Tel Aviv is an example of an urban modern city with a strong municipality responsible to serve its citizens as well as to empower visitors, businesses, and tourists. The municipality is involved in many projects that made Tel-Aviv the worlds smartest city. Tel Aviv has provided its citizens with free citywide WiFi and a resident app that achieved over 60% resident usage.

Challenge

Tel Aviv’s DigiTel app enables its residents engaging with the municipality centers and communicate their messages via a user friendly interface. The interface encourages residents to communicate with the city through online forms. Residents can add attachments, such as photos and documents, to their messages. Of course, this is a great opportunity for those with a malicious intent to hack the municipality and submit a malicious file via the city portal.

Solution

The municipality decided to use Deep File Inspection technology based on CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction) algorithms to scan all files submitted to Tel-Aviv portal and app. NetFolder by odix, comprises of a patented, field proven TrueCDR™ engine scans, disarms and rebuilds files into clean versions, before sending them back to the municipality employees’ inboxes. The odix solution is deployed on Microsoft Azure and enables elastic scalability.

Key takeaway

Municipalities have become a clear target for hackers not only for the valuable citizens data they hold but also since they are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. Any file a municipality obtains from outside its organization can potentially be dangerous. Cyberattacks happen through files sent both from citizen portals and via regular email. Therefore, municipalities must verify that all the data their employees access is safe and malware -free.