IACP 2014 – October 25th – 28th, Orlando, FL – Day 2 – LE Cyber Threats and Attacks
Day Two at IACP and straight in early on Sunday morning to attend the Cyber Threats and Attacks Facing Law Enforcement Agencies session. Having attended the last two Cyber Threat Summits in Dublin, Ireland, I am well aware of the challenges we are all facing everyday in trying to protect our technology.
Mark Gage opened with a very worrisome statement, saying that we spend so much money trying to protect everything else in our lives, but not enough care is given to protecting our information and identity networks. We are at risk every single day, just by viewing Facebook or opening up an untrusted email attachment our phones/laptops can become infected, and spread malware.
We should all know better, in-fact we do know better, we know the risks associated with all these things, but yet we are all capable of making silly mistakes and suffering the consequences.
Mark says the most important thing is to educate your staff, consult with those you share systems with, do not use the same password for everything, and make your password changes a minimum of 90 days. It’s also critical that we keep all software up to date, particularly anti-virus software, and implement back up procedures. For companies, he suggests paying money to employ IT staff or contractors.
George Arruda spoke next of the worst day for him in Sept 2013, whilst driving on holiday in Florida, he received a phone call, which gave him the news he dreaded – a virus had locked down ALL of Swansea Police Department’s files thanks to a vicious virus called Cryptolocker!
The only way to get the files back was to pay a ransom of bitcoins, to some criminals out there in cyberspace. He didn’t know who there were, or where they originated from, but he gave the order to pay and get the files back.
A cyber security expert was called in and he advised against this, but they eventually began the transactions of transferring bitcoins and they started to get data back. The main problem here was that they did not have back up, so they were indeed in a vulnerable position.
Having amassed a very large amount of data, this incident shook the Swansea PD. On the back of this, George gave advice to everyone – Back Up Everything and teach your staff NOT to open anything suspicious, and only have ONE administrator access with a password.
Steve Sambar warned of the dangers of terrorist cyber attacks, and the worry of, if they attack, what do we do? Who will be responsible for handling it? How long will it take to cover? We face so many threats every day, human error, insider threats, external threats. Many big corporations have suffered already. For example, Target had 40 million accounts hacked in Dec. 2013, and Ebay’s database with 233m users was hacked in Feb. 2014.
Jim Emerson had the last word, delivering a fast paced description of the emerging threats and challenges. Everything is happening faster, he said, and we have to understand the reality of what cyber security is.
He showed two short videos from IACP about cyber security, these are available on the IACP website. Jim wants us to:
- Check carefully where is the suspicious email coming from.
- Be aware of who you connected to.
Jim also stressed the importance of this being a day to day footrace, and it never ends. He is right, and we do not want to be sorry when it is too late.
Until next time…take care of yourselves!
r/Mary