As the covid19 pandemic continues to impact the Caribbean, a regional group of computer experts is calling for more to be done to keep critical systems secure, resilient and accessible in the face of mounting threats.
The call came from several speakers at the fourth annual technical community forum hosted by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG).
“The covid19 pandemic has forced organisations and governments to accelerate the digitization of systems and rush to get essential services online,” said Bevil Wooding, Director of Caribbean Affairs at ARIN, a nonprofit corporation that manages the distribution of Internet number resources in many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, Canada, and the United States.
“This rush to online service delivery has exposed several weak points in the region’s internet infrastructure, human resource capacity and institutional readiness. It is now more challenging than ever before to keep critical local and regional systems secure, resilient and accessible. It is also now more than ever our collective responsibility to ensure that the region is able to effectively address these important issues,” Wooding said.
Barbadian-born Niel Harper, chief information security officer at the United Nations Office for Project Services, called for closer attention to be paid to developing relevant local skills and addressing growing cybersecurity threats.
“Recent events – including the adoption of remote work, the rapid shift to the cloud computing, and some high-profile cyber-attacks – all indicate that the threat landscape is more complex than ever,” Harper said.
He encouraged Caribbean stakeholders to work together to mitigate the risks posed by increasing cyber threats.
“Resilience comes through collaboration and cooperation, including information sharing, joint incident response exercises, workforce development, and learning from corrective actions. We all face the same risk to our networks, our data and our users. There is a lot that we can learn from each other, even within competitive industries,” he said.
Dr Moniphia Hewling, founder of cybersecurity consultancy eMRock and former head of the Jamaica Cyber Incident Response Team, provided an overview of the Caribbean cybersecurity landscape. She highlighted some of the issues being confronted by security practitioners and called for greater transparency in reporting cyber-attacks across the region.
“To better understand the problem cyber-attacks pose to the region we must be able to better measure the extent and impact of attacks. This requires greater and more timely disclosure by affected organisations so that hard numbers can be attached to the cybersecurity problem. Where there is no effective measurement, mitigation and remediation will always be compromised,” Hewling stated.
The audience included network administrators, technology professionals, regulators, security experts, academics, and bu
