- Hi, I’m Martin Rust.
I’m with the Security and Policy Institute for Professional
Development, here, at the University of Ottawa.
Today, I’m with Cheri McGuire who is the vice president of Global Public Policy
for the Symantec Corporation.
And we are talking about cybersecurity.
Cheri, cybersecurity is a vast and complex topic and ‘it is
come from’ … over the 10 or the last 15 years, but where are we at today?
What kind of threats are we seeing today and what … Perhaps
you can provide some examples.
- Sure.
So, the threat landscape that we see today is a combination really of different
types of attack vectors.
So, we are seeing distributive denial of service attacks, we’re
seeing theft of intellectual property and personally identifiable information.
We’re also seeing new types of threats like ransomware
and CryptoLocker where, for example, a criminal may send you an email, a phishing
email as it’s called, where they are trying to
get you to do something that … click on an attachment, for example, that might infect
your machine.
So, these attack vectors are very very broad, from large scale attacks
against major enterprises to very targeted against the individual user, trying to elicit
a particular type of reaction or response.
- And how does the marketplace respond to these types of attacks?
- Well, I think the marketplace is responding in a number of ways.
One is there is a lot of new innovations going on in the security field.
There is no question about that.
But as far as protection of networks, enterprises, individual
consumers, we’re seeing a growing awareness, a growing adoption of security
measures.
Certainly, the market, both consumers and enterprises, can do things to
protect themselves.
So, things like strong passwords, using encryption, making sure your
security software is up to date.
Those kinds of basic measures.
Certainly, we’ve seen, in a report that just came out recently by
the Online Trust Alliance … was that 90% of data breaches could be prevented by basic
cyberhygiene.
And so those are things that everyone can take a role in, everyone has a
responsibility to be cyberaware and cybersafe.
- Right.
And at Symantec Corporation, what are the kinds of things you’ve developed to
offer to the marketplace, to help some of these companies deal with these things?
- So, Symantec is the largest security company, security vendor in the world.
We’ve been doing this for more than 30 years.
We have a whole array of products and services from
our Norton consumer protection to our Symantec end point protection for enterprises,
managed security services, incident response services and encryption, to our certificate
authority for authentication, you name it, we’re sort of in the security space.
- And you’re seeing more and more the marketplace coming to you to demand those
types of products?
- Absolutely.
As that awareness is growing, and certainly, the press has helped with that
and fortunately, many of these large data breaches are driving large organizations,
medium-sized organizations and small organizations to really take more action and be
more proactive to protect their sensitive information and their customer information.
- And for the average company, what’s the most important thing that they need to do?
- The most important thing they need to do is, number one, recognize that security is
an imperative.
They need to build that into their culture, within their company.
Just like they have physical security to protect their products
or their services, they also need the same for their online data.
- So really, it’s still about people, when it comes down to it, in creating a culture
of awareness and a culture of understanding.
- It is.
Absolutely.
- Thank you very much, Cheri.
I’m Martin Rust with the Security and Policy Institute,
here, at the University of Ottawa, and I’ve been speaking with Cheri McGuire, the vice
president of Global Public Policy for the Symantec Corporation.