Cyber attacks threat seminar

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Jersey business leaders have been warned that it is not a question of if there is a cyber attack on their business, but when.

Mark Stuchfield, VP, Business Development, JT Lab said more money is being spent on the development of attacks, than there is in protection from them.

“Last year at JT we protected our network from eighty Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and we expect that number to grow.’ DDoS attacks are concerted efforts to bring down a website or system by bombarding it with requests so that it can’t respond to legitimate traffic,” he said.

In addition to Mr Stutchfield, the expert panel included: Paul King, director, threat intelligence at Cisco Systems, Raheila Nazir, cyber and technology lead for the UK at AIG and Chris Clark, Managing Director of Prosperity 24.7

Richard Le Tocq, director of  Heritage Insurance who chaired the panel, said it was an excellent opportunity to hear from some of the top experts in this field.

“Cyber Security has to be taken seriously, we rely on data and technology and quite simply this can bring businesses down and affect reputation. We are seeing more and more cases being reported, locally as well as worldwide. People may not realise that malware or viruses can be dormant on systems for months before the criminals use it to attack a system,” he said.
 
Mr Clark said his company has seen first hand the disruption illicit access has caused his clients.

“The threat is real, and while we can fully appreciate there are many competing areas of investment that businesses have to choose to spend their budget on, all we ask is that companies ensure they aren’t building on a house of cards,” he said.