‘Sleepless nights’ for officials over IT attacks

Senior IT systems officials in the Department of Social Protection have admitted to “sleepless nights” over the possibility of hackers disrupting or bringing down its payments network.

Niall Barry, the assistant secretary of information systems at the department, also revealed that one of the country’s two main data centres was knocked offline due to flooding last year.

Speaking before a meeting of the Oireachtas committee on jobs, social protection and education, Mr Barry said the reason for having two main data centres was if one was not working the other would ensure the system continued to operate.

The centres hold client data related to millions of claims and payments processed every year.

“We lost one of those data centres in floods last year and the service slowed, I have to admit, but people did not see the consequences of that,” said Mr Barry.

Even though the centre affected by the flooding was not operating for a week, staff were working within 30 minutes of the initial problem and there was no issue regarding the processing of data.

Government systems have been targeted in recent months by hackers and Mr Barry said more resources were being used to combat such attacks.

He told the committee security problems were the “single biggest issue” faced by his unit, led by “concerted attacks on government network”.

These had caused “sleepless nights for people as they fended off those attacks”, he said.

Mr Barry said more than 12 firewalls were dedicated to beating the attacks.

The committee was told the department’s IT system helps deal with 1.4 million weekly recipients and 87 million payments per year — the equivalent of 250,000 made every day.

Mr Barry said the system had been shown to be reliable, adding: “We do not fail to make payments.”

He and his fellow officials said efforts were being made to reduce the number of cheques in the system as part of a move to a more paperless operation.

He said efforts were also being made to limit the number of phones in use in the department, while the biometric public services card will also be rolled out this year.

However, he said putting fingerprint data on the card would add to the workload of “already stretched” local offices.