At a time when municipal water systems in seven states have suffered cyberattacks, the need to guard against malicious hacking has taken on greater urgency. Mississippi’s hospitals and other institutions have meanwhile been subjected to their own run of attacks, yet for years the state has not required the facilities to defend against them. Against that backdrop, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has created a Senate Select Committee on Cybersecurity to study the security of state and local government computer systems and review how Mississippi prosecutes cybercrime. Hosemann points to the most severe recent Mississippi case, in February 2026, when a ransomware group that security researchers link to Russia took the University of Mississippi Medical Center offline for more than a week, which resulted in the closure of its clinics, forced doctors to work with pen and paper, and demanded an $800,000 ransom. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security joined the recovery in that case. UMMC houses the state’s only children’s hospital, its only Level I trauma center and its only organ transplant program. Hosemann said cybercrime costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars. The medical center was the fourth Mississippi hospital system hit in three years. A 2023 ransomware attack on Singing River Health System in Ocean Springs exposed the health information of nearly a million people. North Mississippi Health Services and OCH Regional Medical Center in Starkville were struck the same year. UMMC had been breached before that. A decade ago, it paid $2.75 million in federal fines after the 2013 theft of a laptop exposed about 10,000 patients’ records, and federal investigators found the center had known of the vulnerability since 2005 and left it unaddressed. Through all of this, Mississippi has had no state law requiring hospitals to guard against cyberattacks. Only the federal