Cyber Security in an International Context

To mark Data Privacy and Protection Day 2017, we will focus on this topic in our upcoming blogs. We have just gone through the ‘Cyber Essentials Certified’ process to become Irelands only Cyber Essential Certified Document Shredding and Hard Drive Destruction company.

Cyber Essentials (CE) is a cyber security certification scheme that offers a sound foundation of basic IT security controls that all types of organisation’s can implement and potentially build upon. Implementing these controls can significantly reduce an organisations vulnerability. The scheme specifies five key areas of I.T security control that can help to prevent around 80% of known cyber-attacks. Cyber Essentials is for organisations of all sizes and in all sectors. The Cyber Essentials scheme provides businesses large and small with clarity on good basic cyber security practice.

We thought it might be interesting in sharing our experience our experience in becoming cyber aware and the importance of it going forward. To this end, we have decided to construct a series of articles in this area over the coming weeks, focusing around:

• Cyber Security in an international and Irish context
• 5 top tips in moving towards being Cyber aware
• The importance of secure IT Destruction
• Our experience in going through the Cyber Essentials Certification programme

But first within an international context “Cyber Security” has been identified as a major “Global Risk” according to the World Economic forum. A “global risk” is defined as an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, can cause significant negative impact for several countries or industries within the next 10 years. The growing significance of Cyber Security is exemplified with the WEF “Global Risks Landscape 2017”.

To highlight some of the major cyber-attacks in 2016, from the Panda Security website.

• US Election: Hackers managed to get to many of the emails sent from and to one of the presidential candidates and members of her team.
• Yahoo data leak: Earlier this year Yahoo admitted to more than 500 million user accounts being stolen from them back in 2013.
• Major DNS Service Provider: A massive cyber-attack against US DNS service provider Dyn knocked out major websites across the Internet earlier this year.
• The attack affected several websites, including Netflix, Twitter, Amazon and The New York Times.

Imagine this: If you leave the ‘safeguard’ and ‘comfort’ of your home, you can be hit by lethal floods, hurricanes, terrorists and earthquakes. Yet stay inside, browsing on your computer and you could lose all your data and your identity, to somebody across the other side of the world. As ridiculous as these sound, these are the top and mostly likely threats of 2017. We will look at the most important points to take away from this combined perspective of experts and global decision-makers in the coming weeks.

Feel free to link back to this blog, and coming up in next weeks blog we have: ‘Cyber Security in an Irish Context’.

Tony