Combating Ireland’s cybercrime epidemic with intelligence-driven cyber resilience

Guest post by Fergal Lyons, Cybersecurity Evangelist at Centripetal

The cybercrime epidemic

Ireland Is a nation losing the fight against cybercrime. It costs our economy €10 billion annually according to a 2022 Grant Thornton Report , placing it comfortably among the most profitable criminal enterprises affecting Ireland. It isn’t just our economy that is in danger however. Breaches such as the 2021 cyberattack on the HSE (or the more recent MoveIT attack, also affecting the HSE) have the potential to disrupt not just our economy but our way of life, leading to serious harm or worse.

There has been limited government intervention to attempt to combat this, with a €4.2 million fund set up in May of this year to provide financial help to companies hoping to boost their cybersecurity posture. However, the statistics point to this having extremely limited success: A recent survey suggested as many as 70% of Irish businesses had been hit by cyberattacks in the last 12 months.The evidence paints a picture of a country fundamentally lacking in cyber resilience.

The skills shortage

Running parallel to this failure of resilience is a lack of staff to combat it. Consulting firm Expleo earlier this year found that 94% of businesses in Ireland struggled to find IT staff. This is despite the significant interest in developing cybersecurity talent at an academic level: The University of Galway for example offers two courses in cybersecurity – one in Cybersecurity Risk Management and a further in Cybersecurity and Software development, which develops both a business and technological graduate pool of budding security professionals.

This theoretically should lead to a healthy pool of cybersecurity talent, ready and willing to help Irish companies remain secure. However, the Irish skills gap remains compounded by the presence of multinational technology providers including Apple, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Meta which use Ireland as an EU operations base.

Technology hubs like Cork and Galway also serve as great locations for US-based cybersecurity companies looking to build their presence in Europe, in addition to homegrown security companies. This gives graduates, native talent, and immigrants to Ireland a wealth of cybersecurity and technology positions to choose from – particularly as many of these companies will host data centres in Ireland, all of which would have cybersecurity considerations to be met.

As such, Ireland’s status as a leading technology hub has actually served to widen the skills gap; All of the stakeholders above are actively fighting to hire and retain cybersecurity talent.

Threat actors and technology

The volume of threats facing Ireland on a daily basis means that we cannot simply spend or hire our way out of this problem. While these are certainly valuable assets, alongside a programme of cyber-education which extends across Irish communities, technological solutions need to be at the heart of our response to this crisis, in the same way it sits at the heart of threat actor’s strategies.

Cybercriminals are so successful because they do not play by the same rules as us. When they are looking to increase their output, their solutions are technology based, as opposed to people based.

Many attack vectors, such as large-scale phishing attacks, or malware distribution, are now automated to the point that attackers may not even know what organisation they have compromised until they’re successfully resident in the network. At that point, they will wait dormant, and move laterally until they either decide the target is not worth exploiting, or they find something interesting and execute.

Intelligence-driven resilience

This belief in technology has worked wonders for the threat actors. It is time for the cybersecurity industry to respond in kind. While we cannot downplay the importance of education, or of hiring talented people within the security space to manage the technologies, it is the technology itself that is going to save us. By augmenting the ability of the human hires we make, we can start to successfully respond to the volume of threats we currently see, which is beyond the capability of any hiring push alone.

Using augmented and intelligence-driven technology can help, levelling the playing field to a position where defensive cyber teams have a fighting chance against the daily onslaught of threats. We know this is possible, because the intelligence is out there. Over 300 different threat intelligence providers are all currently operating, providing their own customers with data on emerging attack vectors. However, these vendors do not communicate effectively with each other, or develop a full and contextualised picture of the threat. As such, the data is effectively lost.

It’s time for the industry to deploy proactive, intelligent solutions to cybersecurity problems. By using intelligence to harness the power of existing threat intelligence data sets, organisations in Ireland and beyond can work to ensure that the data developed by security providers does not fall on deaf ears.

In the process, we can ensure that the onus for improved security does not fall on unrealistic, often impossible attempts to hire, or spend our way out of the problem. Instead we can turn the hacker’s own playbooks of technology-driven attacks back against them, with technology-driven defences which leave every layer of Irish society safer from cybercrime.

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