Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center

The Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) is an organization where U.S. state, city, and county governments, along with public agencies like water utilities and power grid operators, pool information about cyberattacks. Instead of each neighborhood setting up its own separate watch group, think of it as a shared neighborhood watch network: when one house gets robbed, the alert goes out right away to the house next door and the next town over.

Unlike large corporations or the federal government, local governments and smaller public agencies often lack dedicated cybersecurity staff or budget. Rather than each one struggling to respond to threats on its own, this center's role is to quickly spread word of an attack method and how to counter it to other member organizations as soon as one of them is hit, reducing the overall damage.