From: iPOLITICS.ca
By James Munson
Public Safety Canada is inviting the country’s top executives to talk cyber security and deepen their collaborative protection of critical infrastructure.
In coming months, officials from the department are expected to engage the C-suite crowd on what the latter thinks should be done about the trust gap between both camps when it comes to cyber security, according to the head of the country’s top cyber attack monitoring office.
“There’s a lot of work going on in the background,” said Windy Anderson, director of the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC), speaking at a security conference in Ottawa last week. “I think in the next month or two they’re going to be getting the major CEOs of the top to twelve companies in Canada sitting down with government … talking to them specifically about cyber, and what needs to happen on both sides, and what do these companies want the government to do, and what the government would like them to do.”
Ottawa has been taking on the cyber security threat from hackers, foreign states and the criminal world by asking companies to tell CCIRC about attacks and to provide the office with details about the incidents.
The belief is that the federal government should gain as much knowledge as possible about what kinds of attacks exist and then share that database of information with the private sector afterwards.
But few companies trust the government with data about cyber attacks, even if they own infrastructure that is critical to Canadians, Anderson said at the Securetech conference on Wednesday. Out of the 471 cyber attacks on the private sector last year, only 59 incidents, or 13 per cent, were reported to CCIRC, she said.
That’s forced the government to consider making the reporting of cyber attacks mandatory. Ontario currently has a law that forces natural gas distribution companies to report cyber attacks on their computer systems, according to the Canadian Gas Association.
But the CEO meetings won’t immediately lead to mandatory reporting, said a spokesperson with Public Safety, despite Anderson’s claims that such a policy is being considered by the department.
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