After Gov. Greg Abbot recently stated that firewalls protecting Texas state government computers had received up to 10,000 attacks per minute in two days, many other state governments are looking at ways to shore up security.

Shortly after Abbot’s statement made it onto Twitter, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster referenced the claim in his own statement that he had directed “state government IT leaders to redouble efforts to aggressively search out, identify and repel any potential cyber attacks or malicious technological intrusions into our state agencies.”

The interest has even reached local levels, according to a report by WPDE. In Conway, South Carolina, the station talked to the city’s IT manager, who had set up a geographical filter to block any inbound or outbound traffick from Iran.

In a blog post by anti-malware company Emisoft, the company claims that “at least” 996 government agencies in the U.S. were impacted by ransomware attacks in 2019, an attack whereby a user’s computer is taken over and a ransom demanded to prevent everything stored on the computer from being deleted.