Steven Williams
Our scant approach to the graveness of cyber crimes which exist today and which threaten many of our local businesses, could well indeed hamper Barbados from becoming the first world developed nation it desires to be.
This was the expressed view of Mr. Steven Williams CEO of Sunisle Technology Solutions, a local IT company which also serves clients in the Eastern Caribbean. Williams was at the time, addressing members of the media during a press conference held last week Tuesday at the Courtyard Mariott, Hastings Christ Church, which announced the partnership of Sunisle and Fortinet, a provider in network security and Unified Threat Management solutions.
The Sunisle CEO who stressed that network security was important, not just for networks themselves but for economic development, argued that in Barbados we tend to focus on murders, robberies and drug related activities, whilst not paying enough attention to organised cyber-crime which was by far, more lucrative than other types of jurisdiction bound illegal activity.
Said Williams, “If you are going to put a country as a first world nation, you have to have first world infrastructure… Barbados is trying to become a developed nation and these are things that developed countries worry about. You cannot be thinking that this type of crime is hairy-fairy business”.
Outlining some of his concerns for the local business community, Williams stated that he was grieved by the fact that up to present, a Data Protection Act had not been passed as yet. He questioned what policies government had to support organisations such as Fortinet that research and fights against the threat of malware.
“At the end of the day what you’re talking about is data protection you want a data protection act that states when u break into a network, it’s a crime”, he said.
“It may not speak to the types of data people are going after, it may just speak to things you should not do with it. But once you’ve done it and you capture the data, what you do with it becomes an issue”.
Williams explained that cyber crime was critical to the smallest businesses as going after a larger network was too complicated. “They have security professionals and different governance systems in place, but small businesses think these things have nothing to do with me”.
However Williams suggested that small businesses were being targeted, not for their networks most of the time, but because their networks could act as a mule or gateway to larger networks. By galvanising many small networks, cyber criminals were able to launch an attack on more lucrative networks and in many cases, the smaller networks were clueless to what was going on.
An obvious target for cyber criminals would be banks and according to Williams, this was one of the reasons why recording cyber crime and having statistics was important. “We don’t call into the police to say, “my system just got hacked”. How many banks do you think tell the press or police their systems were hacked, they hush it up, change the firewall, change the policy and tell the public or press everything is A ok”, opined Williams.
“[That’s because] the embarrassment alone could be worth millions of dollars. So it’s an economic [trade-off]…”
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