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Chapter 1: What is Ireland's upcoming EU presidency and its implications for cybersecurity?
Next though, we were talking yesterday about Ireland's six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, which starts on the 1st of July. It will boost the country's profile and attract all sorts of attention, some of it good, some of it not so good, with predictions that we can expect an increase in cyber attacks.
The National Cyber Security Centre has been preparing for the type of cyber incidents that may come our way. which can vary from ransomware threats to so-called hacktivism. Leading the country's defence in the face of those types of attacks is Richard Brown, Director of the National Cyber Security Centre, who joins me on the line. Richard, good morning.
Good morning, David.
Chapter 2: How is the National Cyber Security Centre preparing for increased cyber threats?
How are you?
Very well, thanks. How many cyber incidents, attacks are we experiencing at the moment?
So on average, we get between 30 and 40. It varies, obviously, month to month cyber attacks that reach our threshold. And we have a multistage process we go through that rates incidents on a scale. 30 or 40. So we've more than 200 this year so far. But of that 200, only about 10 or 12 are large enough to actually merit a formal response by us.
But we see an ongoing cadence of incidents all the time of a variety of different types.
Okay. And those different types, could you just explain them to me?
So we see cyber attacks come in a wide range of different types of, in terms of scale, complexity, and their impact on the public. The ones people will be most familiar with, I'm sure, are ransomware, which is where somebody breaks into a system, locks it or encrypts it, then demands money for the return of data.
And we see those, we've had four or five of those in the last couple of weeks alone here. That's unfortunately a very common criminal type of actor. We also see what we call hacktivism, which is
And those types of attacks are very often denial of service attacks or attempted denial of service attacks, which is simply where an actor just takes a load of data and fires it at a website or a system, try and knock it over and remove it from service for a while. And these are just nuisance type attacks.
We also then see espionage on a fairly regular basis, which is where state or non-state actors seek to steal information from a public body, a research institution, whatever it might be. And then, of course, much more rare, but it does still happen, are destructive attacks, where someone actively tries to break something, remove a service, break into a system and remove it from operation somehow.
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Chapter 3: What types of cyber incidents are currently being reported in Ireland?
What do we need to do to ensure that the state's requirements are met? So this is just what we do. It is a good thing that people aren't aware of these because it means the consequences aren't being felt. It's when they are felt that we have a problem.
In terms of the European presidency, I mean, judging by the experience of other countries, are we likely to see an upsurge once we're sort of more on the radar of some of these people?
To a degree, yes. So, I mean, just to go back for a second, we obviously engage with colleagues across Europe on a daily basis, sharing threat intelligence, receiving their threat intelligence and a whole range of other types of activities.
As part of the wind-up to the presidency, we've gone off and conducted a full formal cyber threat assessment to run the presidency, truly engaging with the last seven or eight or nine different presidency cybersecurity entities, so our colleagues in other European countries. jurisdictions.
And they've all seen, if you look at Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, they've all seen relatively significant increases in cyber incidents in certain cases. So that's not to say that things go bad for the entire six months. It's much more likely that during periods within the presidency, when there is politically sensitive
been a target or a vector of a lot of this or European budgets or whatever it might be, then you'll see some more activity in the cyber domain. And that's exactly what we're preparing for. So if you look at, for example, the Polish presidency, they had a lot of activism around funding for Ukraine. Same thing happened in the Spanish presidency.
So those types of things are what we expect to see during ours. We've prepared for this. I mean, most of the preparations we have in place for years are designed to deal with this anyway, and we do it on a daily basis. So nothing will change in that regard. We've also gone and conducted a full national dress rehearsal for a major cybersecurity incident during the presidency two weeks ago.
So we ran an exercise called Exercise ARU, which included a full one day. So we've gone from if you like, business as usual through to if it goes really badly wrong, how do we manage and react?
And did we manage?
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Chapter 4: What are the different types of cyber attacks and their impacts?
Would they be targeting, I don't know, banks, airports? What do you think they'd be looking at without wishing to draw attention to anything?
Well, I suppose three things and take it in reverse order. The actual target here, for the most part, of hacktivist attacks are not, if you like, the entity that they're directly targeting. It's you. It's the media. They want to draw attention to their cause, if you like. They want to intimidate. They want to frighten.
So the ultimate target here is for you to be reporting on it, for the news to be covering cybersecurity incidents. So to go back from that, to do so, they will target anything that they think will attract media attention. It could be a website to do with the presidency. It could be a media website. It could be essentially anything. So if we're talking hacktivism, those are the likely targets.
Anything at all that will drive media attention towards their activity. There are, of course, a range of other types of targets. Espionage affecting government or related entities is always a real possibility. States are very interested in any information about what the European Union is doing around the presidency. So espionage is an ongoing, very high possibility during a presidency.
That will likely never make the public domain. It shouldn't, but it's a possibility. And then receding then into the far end of the probability matrix, it's also possible you'll see destructive attack. It's very unlikely. It's very, very rare, but it could happen. And we have to be aware of that too and prepared for that as well.
Okay. I know there's legislation in TRAIN, the National Cyber Security Bill, which will put your centre on a statutory footing and give it greater powers. What difference will that make and when do you expect that to be introduced?
So we have statutory powers since 2018 around incident response for critical infrastructure. So we're already empowered to do a large amount of what we're doing. There's a further European Union directive that is being transposed right now, the cybersecurity bill. The actual final version hasn't been published yet. What that will do is essentially establish us on a statutory basis.
It won't allow us to do much more on that, but will also give us statutory powers to do more in the national security space. Those powers are obviously necessary up to the Oireachtas, of course, if we get them in the form that they're published. But beyond that, there's more we can do with the NIS2 or the new directive type powers. But absent them, we can still do a huge amount already.
We have a fully established, you know, in the top 10 in Europe cyber incident response team. We've published national cyber emergency response plan. We've exercised it repeatedly. We have very strong powers already with regard to critical infrastructure. So we're in a fairly good position anyway.
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