Southern California Raises Cyber Bar, Lowers Phishing Rates

With the goal of strengthening fiscal and operational resilience, South Pasadena’s Tim Scholefield and his IT shop have a new road map for the city’s cybersecurity journey.

Scholefield is the new IT and systems manager, a position launched on Oct. 6 with the creation of Information Technology Services (ITS), according to city documents. He has more than two decades of experience in IT and was previously with the Rio Hondo College as executive director of IT services.

The FY 2025-26 budget includes funding for ITS, enhanced cybersecurity, hardware, software and a new city ERP system.

During the Cybersecurity and Fiscal Resilience 2025 Update to the city Finance Commission, Scholefield stressed that “secure systems protect public dollars.”

From a people perspective, he reported that during October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, his office worked across the city to train employees on email readiness and test them. There was 100 percent participation in their cybersecurity programming, and there is regular phishing training. The result was that only 2.6 percent of phishing emails were successful, much lower than the national average of 16 percent, and 57 percent of suspicious emails were reported, higher than the national average of 42 percent.

“We test the waters, and sometimes people fail,” Scholefield said. “We get those notifications, and we have a conversation. The campaign’s over, but the secret is … that we need to push in where we see a trend and keep people on their toes.”

There were multiple updates to the committee, as reflected in the meeting minutes. The city will use National Institute of Standards and Technology and Center for Internet Security best practices and standards to build out cybersecurity planning already advancing, he said. There is a hardware refresh policy, redundancy for disaster recovery readiness, upgraded firewall and switch infrastructure, and multifactor authentication deployed on email and VPN.

Next up is a transition to cloud-based enterprise resource planning, performing a full cybersecurity assessment and exploring additional cloud and hybrid services.

“Ultimately, once we get all of those pieces together, taking a look again at our disaster recovery plan, our incident response plan … it’s very exciting, we’ve done a lot of work,” Scholefield said. “All of these things strengthen our fiscal resilience and our operational resilience.”

The city of South Pasadena has about 26,000 residents and is a northeast suburb of Los Angeles. ITS coordinates and oversees management services contractor Acorn Technologies and will work with departments to increase efficiency. ITS reports to the Finance Department.