How should we protect ourselves from cyberattacks?

Paul Davis (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman.

Shane Colman (0:04)

On Newstalk, with Kia.

Now, the head of Britain's Financial Watchdog is urging the public to hold two bank accounts in the case of an IT meltdown or a cyber attack. We've also recently seen our supermarkets become part of the battlefield. Now, Dr. Paul Davis, lecturer in Dublin City University, has been writing in The Journal about how recent cyber incidents and security threats across Europe are showing just how vulnerable the infrastructure behind our everyday lives has become. He joins us now. Paul, thanks indeed for talking to us. You write about how back in the day, the battlefield was somewhere identifiable. It had tanks, it may have had Navy vessels, aircraft overhead. Today, it may be in the skies, on the airwaves, or even in the supermarket freezer, beside the frozen peas. The rules of engagement have changed.

Paul Davis (1:02)

They have. I mean, the whole facet of supply chain, in terms of modern supply chains, came out of World War II in the logistics for the likes of D-Day and that. We've moved on from there. What we did was we got our supply chains that are now globally connected. So we ship goods from everywhere around the world to our supermarkets, but we also ship products that actually hold those goods. And the example that I was using was the freezer situation.

So we had a cyber attack on the freezers, but it automatically showed up a vulnerability in the supply chain, one that nobody had even thought of. So it isn't just the 13 stores that we've seen in Ireland. We've had this over the last month with a range of stores right across Europe, all because of a particular piece that's in the freezer that can be attacked.

If I move away from the basic premise of the battlefield and think about this from a supply chain point of view, it basically means that our supply chains are vulnerable. And they're vulnerable not at a level that we've ever expected. They're vulnerable because of small pieces inside the supply chain that we don't see. We don't know.

Shane Colman (2:12)

Okay, you are a pain to stress in your piece. It's not an argument against digitalization, but you're saying what makes these incidents interesting is the imbalance between the cost of causing the disruption, which is pretty minimal, and the cost of responding to it.

Paul Davis (2:28)

Absolutely. What we've seen on the far side of the supply chain, particularly with the freezers, was large costs. You're talking tens of millions of food being lost, being destroyed by being heated, by being defrosted, having to be thrown out. But that's the first phase of it. The second phase is that you then have to replace that food. So there's further orders gone in with transport costs. So the costs are enormous, just because somebody switched up a freezer temperature or changed the freezer temperature.

So it's really important that the small change that's occurring in the supply chain has major knock-on effects from costs all the way down. I was speaking to one of your reporters earlier, and I was explaining that even with the aircraft, we see it as a bomb trend affecting consumers.

But many of our aircraft are actually transporting products as well, from a business-to-business perspective. So they may be, particularly coming from Ireland, we may be transporting pharmaceuticals to that because they're high-value products. If any of those planes get diverted, there's additional costs of those products being re-rooted, even being delayed in the supply chain. This is how vulnerable we are. And we tend not to see that part of it. We tend to see the effect on ourselves as individuals.

Shane Colman (3:43)

You make the point that while cybersecurity is essential, it only addresses part of the challenge. And that's about, cybersecurity is about prevention, but ensuring that essential goods and services keep flowing when the system fails is a question of resilience. How do we become more resilient?

Paul Davis (4:02)

This is something that Europe is tackling now. We're starting to look at maybe buying more, building more, manufacturing more in Europe, and everybody gives out about that. But there is an element to it that if your supply chains are stretched globally, you can't control them. And that any shift in geopolitical power or any shift in war, for instance, we've seen it with the Hormuz Strait. But we saw something as simple as the Suez Canal a couple of years ago, when a ship got stuck and we have delays. So more and more organizations are looking at, how do we move production and manufacturing closer to home?