An expert in cybersecurity from the U.K. is one of the people speaking as part of a panel this week in New Brunswick about online threats.
Dermot Williams is the CEO of the IT security firm Threatscape and says a lot of organizations think about the threat of breaches and and data loss like they would think of a rodent problem — set a few traps and forget it — but Williams’ message is that you should think of it more like a fire threat.
“You take all the steps you can to deal with all the anticipated problems, but after that you need to be monitoring constantly,” says Williams. “You need to have alarms, you need to have sensors, you need to detect when there is a problem, even though you did everything you could to prevent there being a problem, and if and when you detect a problem you absolutely need to have a response plan.”
Recently it was announced by Yahoo that the company had experienced a breach in late 2014 affecting at least 500-million user accounts. Williams says the size of the breaches and the amount of money cyber criminals are making is simply adding fuel to the fire — because they’re being successful they’re going to keep doing it.
“I’m not saying that companies aren’t necessarily taking it seriously enough, but what I’m saying is they may not realize the amount of continuous effort that is required to properly deal with the threat and they’re not resourcing themselves to do so.”
The panel is at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton this weekend and is called Cybersecurity in a Dangerous Time.
Along with Williams, the panel also features the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and dean of the faculty of computer science at UNB Dr. Ali Ghorbani, CTO with IBM Security Systems and co-found of Q1 Labs Sandy Bird, senior executive partner with Gardner Inc Dr. Christian Couturier, and a representative of Cyber NB.
It’s happening Saturday, October 1 at 10:30 in the morning at the Dineen Auditorium in Head Hall.
