CYBER CRIME THREAT TO GARDA & DEFENCE FORCES
Expert’s warning on massive risk to infrastructure
A NUMBER of attacks on the Garda and Defence Forces’ computer systems have been stopped by a top Government security agency.
The National Cyber Security Centre, which is responsible for overseeing the tech security of State IT and critical national infrastructures, said there have been a number of threats on the bodies.
The highly trained unit, which was formed in 2011 and is an arm of the Department of Communications, lead in the management of major cyber security incidents and gives guidance to people and businesses.
Among it achievements are the setting up of a threat-intelligence exchange group and database to assist agencies and departments in protecting networks.
At a briefing at the NCSC’S Dublin headquarters, a spokesman revealed the threats to the Defence Forces and gardai but said he couldn’t talk about many of them in public.
He added: “It’s a function of what we do to an extent because we are dealing with things that if you tell people what you have seen you are giving away the fact that you can see it.
“It’s a live environment. There are real live threats out there all the time from wide variety of threat actors.”
And he said the level of software “state Hackers are a major threat actors” at the top of the threat pyramid use and pass to bedroom cyber criminals, is increasingly fast and alarming.
The spokesman, who cannot be named for security reasons, warned a major a cyber attack could be devastating.
He said “First one is large infiltration of data from a Government network. Similarly, if you are talking about infrastructure, we have seen incidents in Ukraine and elsewhere where electricity grids were taken down, completely turned off. Television lines have been taken off air in France, banks have been taken offline.
“The world has seen a fundamental shift in the way it has seen this in the last five years.
“NATO declared cyber as the fifth domain of warfare. It means they would actually take it as an act of war.
“We don’t have incidents of scale every day but perhaps once a week. This is a live environment and it’s not getting any quieter.
“A lot of the things that happen people never hear about We have a considerable journey to go but we’ve done a lot. “You have to continually develop new systems.”
Year the National Cyber Security Centre was set up by Government