‘Whatever you are spending on cyber security is not enough’

Irish people need to be more guarded in their social media activities, and businesses are not investing enough in their IT security, one of the Garda’s top cyber crime detectives has warned.

“Whatever you are spending on cybersecurity is not enough,” Detective Superintendent Michael Gubbins of the Garda Cyber Crime Bureau told a conference on cyber fraud in University College Cork yesterday.

The conference, Hacking the Human: Cyber Fraud in a Digital Age, heard that cyber fraud is under-reported at both corporate and individual level, and that businesses suffered ransomware attacks such as the NotPetya virus which locks a user’s computer until a ransom is paid to the hackers responsible.