BitDepth#1488
Mark Lyndersay
“WE REALISED, in almost every single (digital breach) incident, the first thing is the hack,” said Anthony Peyson, president of the regional chapter of ISC2 on November 30 at the association’s inaugural Scam Defence 2024 seminar.
“You can hack technology. We know about hacking technology where the hacker breaks into systems. You can hack a process. You don’t often find a spotlight on that. And you can hack a human.”
ISC2 is the merciful acronym for the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, a global collaboration of cybersecurity professionals.
The Caribbean chapter was formed earlier in 2024 in the face of the global surge in cyber threats.
According to Peyson, Latin America and the Caribbean have faced 137 billion cyberattacks in the first half of 2024 alone, a 50 per cent rise over the same period in 2023.
The Scam Defence seminar was the first of a planned annual symposium discussing developments in cybersecurity and the changing face of how access to personally identifiable information (PII) from companies and individuals is being engineered.
The regional chapter has determined that the biggest challenge the Caribbean faces is phishing (fake e-mails and web links) and smishing (fake SMS text messages), both facets of growing sophistication in social engineering techniques.
“We are here to raise awareness, to educate the public and to foster collaboration, we are community,” Peyson said.
At stake is the vulnerability of growing digital and intelligent economies to hacker takedowns.
Gabriel Nunez, Huawei’s cybersecurity and data protection officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, believes that the economy will grow from US$3.6 trillion in 2020 to US$18.8 trillion by 2030.
Nunez saw parallels between how traffic is handled successfully through a collaboration of government and regulators, manufacturers, vendors, users and system architectures that might better protect digital systems.
“Government and regulators develop laws and supervise enforcement, manufacturers produce qualified equipment to international standards, vendors are certified and follow the rules, and users comply with laws and rules and avoid known dangers,” Nunez said.
“No one can solve the traffic problem. Alone, they will not solve the traffic problem. We all have to interact.”
The world is moving, though far more slowly than the internet’s bad actors, toward that kind of collaborative thinking.
Digital nation strategies have been released by 170 countries and regions and more than 60 countries have elevated AI in their national strategy. Action plans for green development have been released by 151 countries and regions.
All 193 UN member states can contribute to the draft UN Convention against Cybercrime, which includes legal support for the criminalisation and prosecution of 11 key cybersecurity crimes across all UN nations.
There’s no shortage of acronyms and technicalities available in the backroom of technology, but the real challenge facing
