Irish Examiner view: Unnerving sense of insecurity

MTU ransomware

MTU announced yesterday it's Cork campuses were to remain closed for the remainder of the week as a result of the breach. Picture: Denis Minihane

Munster Technological University (MTU) was this week forced to close its four Cork campuses because of a major IT breach. 

The university called in the gardaí and the National Cyber Security Centre to establish whether the breach was related to an international ransomware attack on hundreds of organisations.

There’s a vivid irony here when one considers that while measures such as GDPR are in place to maintain public confidence in data protection, in real terms our data has never seemed as vulnerable to attack.

The MTU incident is reminiscent of the attack on the HSE’s services in May 2021, when the organisation’s IT services had to be shut down; confidential patient information was published online after that breach, which was bad enough, but it also took several weeks for the HSE’s IT systems to return to normal operating capability.

This is just one of the consequences of such breaches, the delay in returning systems to full operation, while the sheer cost associated with such attacks is another. 

Shutting down operations, maintaining adequate defences, and then improving those defences to meet more sophisticated attacks are all expensive. 

So is the associated reputational damage an institution suffers following such attacks.

A parallel problem is the origin of such attacks. Experts studying the MTU breach have considered whether it is related to an international hacking attack in recent days which targeted computer servers running an older version of VMware software; the group behind that latest mass attack is linked to the Russian ransomware gang which attacked the HSE two years ago. 

The unnerving sense of insecurity that one can be attacked by someone thousands of miles away isn’t banished when one considers such hackers often have access to the targeted IT system for weeks before attacking; they spend that time identifying where the most valuable data is stored.

In better news, Cyber Ireland, the organisation that brings together industry, academia, and government to represent the cybersecurity sector, chose this week to declare there are huge opportunities for that industry in Ireland.

Just as well.