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THE MINISTER FOR Communications Richard Bruton is today opening a public consultation on a new strategy to protect individuals, businesses and Ireland’s national security from cyber attacks.
The new strategy will set out how best to ensure the resilient, safe and secure operation of computer networks and associated infrastructure used by the State, Irish citizens and business.
It will set out the framework to protect against such threats as hacking, cyber-crime, cryptojacking, hacktivism and cyber espionage.
Minister Bruton is today encouraging interested parties to have their say on what a new national cyber security strategy should look like.
“We have seen the risks that cyber-attacks can pose to a state’s security. We must ensure that our hospitals, schools, personal data and State infrastructure are protected and that Ireland is not vulnerable to such threats,” Bruton said.
“We also need to make sure that individuals and businesses have the necessary safeguards in place to protect themselves,” he said, calling this an issue of “national importance”.
There are already over 6,000 people in Ireland who are employed in the cyber security sector.
“The development of a new national cyber security strategy marks a significant step forward in increasing Ireland’s preparedness for dealing with cyber security incidents, and positioning ourselves as a society and economy to take full advantage of the opportunities to create more high value technology jobs,” Bruton said.
The consultation opens today and includes 10 specific questions, seeking responses and ideas as to how the State can respond to all of these issues – both threats and opportunities.
Any person or organisation can make a representation in relation to the draft guidelines, which can be found online on the Department’s consultation page here.
Interested parties have 30 working days to make their submissions.
These representations will be considered before the final version of the strategy is published and comes into operation.
The draft national cyber security strategy will be open for consultation until 1 May 2019.
The first thing the minister must do is stop the telephone scams from foreign countries looking to target individuals with either callbacks or installing software by pretending to be Microsoft. This can be done at a national level by blacklisting numbers and even operators who allow such scams. Further action can be taken by preventing the operators here collecting money on behalf of any proven scam. These scams can only happen because operators are not charging on a per call basis.
Next is to tackle phishing scams and pass responsibility for preventing access to fake sites to internet service providers and if the sites are hosted in Ireland pursue the hosting individuals or companies. This may take a change in laws but at the end of the day if a hosting company finds itself blocked it will have to take down the site or loose business.
I am not in favour of government controlled internet access as this risks censorship, but I think the Irish, and other, governments need to look at how much the internet in the country depends upon resources located outside the country. I am not talking about Facebook and other social media but I am talking about access to the government network and Irish media sites
Sorry, boring subject….
We have too much skin in the game to make any real changes, we wont upset the big companies settled here… Lip service..
An effective cyber security strategy is vendor agnostic so the big companies won’t be (or shouldn’t be) affected.
It’s hard to maintain blacklists and you will find that lots of legitimate traffic could be blocked by going down this route.
I would suggest that AI and automation can be very effective in this space. If the public have a clear way to report on issues then we could use AI and automation to block this type of traffic reaching the end users.
It’s not an easy problem to tackle but with proper dialogue, discussion and implementation we could be a blueprint for other countries to follow.
Ratify EU Convention on Cybercrime.
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