THUNDER BAY — Local IT leaders gathered this week to address cybersecurity, looking to stay one step ahead of what industry players agree is an intensifying barrage of threats.
The cybersecurity roundtable was hosted Thursday by local technology managed services company TBXI inside Mariner’s Hall at Prince Arthur’s Landing, drawing CIOs and technology leaders from local organizations across the public and private sector.
“The issues are growing exponentially,” said Darrin Homer, a senior account executive with Arctic Wolf Networks and one of the event’s keynote presenters. “We’re seeing it everywhere in the news. You can’t really wake up in the morning without seeing another breach.”
Arctic Wolf provides cybersecurity monitoring, helping organizations detect and respond to malicious activity such as cybercrime, ransomware, and malicious software attacks.
The company has Thunder Bay customers, but is “intensely private” and does not disclose the identity of clients, Homer said in an interview.
“Like every other area in the country, Thunder Bay is seeing the same thing, needing more cybersecurity,” he said. “The challenge for some of the smaller companies is, it’s been the domain of the banks, the insurance companies — it hasn’t been available to them.”
He said Arctic Wolf looks to bring world class solutions to organizations of all sizes, including small businesses.
On Thursday, he spoke with attendees about cyber insurance and the impact of risk and security controls on companies’ insurance premiums.
In his opening remarks, he referred to an ongoing outage affecting Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Ontario locations, the latest cyber attack to hit front pages.
“It’s just another example of what we’re seeing every single day,” he said. “There have been some very notable attacks in Canada of late.”
“Health care is certainly under attack, municipalities are also very targeted. A lot of that has to do with under-investments over the years … It hasn’t been a problem historically, therefore money hasn’t gone towards it.”
Homer said that’s starting to change as organizations realize the need to take the issue more seriously.
Paul Draper, manager of networks, technology, and cloud services with the City of Thunder Bay, said the municipality is among the groups stepping up its response.
“It’s gotten a lot more complicated in the last five years,” he said. “When we check our logs, we see daily attacks. It goes on every single day.”
“We haven’t seen people specifically targeting us,” he added. “Obviously we know certain place have gotten hit, especially in Ontario. We get the reports that any target is a target. Do I feel we’re at the top of the list? Likely not.”
“What we find is attackers prefer easy targets — the easier targets are quicker wins for them. So we try to make ourselves one of the harder targets.”
Having access to a 24/7 security operations centre, one of Arctic Wolf’s offerings, is a strategy the city is considering, Draper said, partly because it’s been identified as a best practice by insurers.
“Our tools are working as they need to, but this is an additional layer that’s an important one people are really starting to look at,” he said. “Unless we get hacked, it’s hard to get practice. That’s why we look for places like Arctic Wolf.”
The consequences for companies that fall victim to attacks can be significant, said Homer.
“It’s not just the ransomware where somebody’s asking for bitcoin. The impact of business outages, of not being able to operate for days at a time, the work that goes into the remediation – lawyers get involved, remediation experts get involved — it can be costly just to get a business up and running again.”
“If you look at those costs, it doesn’t take long for a business to go from a profitable year to an unprofitable year just as a result of a ransomware attack.”
He said organizations need to take a proactive approach, and plan to minimize the impact of successful attacks.
“It’s not all hopeless,” he said. “We can defend. I think you will still see breaches, but they’re going to get lesser in nature, and people are going to be in a better position .”
