The Future of Cybersecurity

“A cyber security breach is when a hacker or a threat is able to gain unauthorized access to a part of a system within an organization which in turn compromises the network,” explains Farah Ismail, Senior Vice-President, Chief Legal, Privacy and Compliance Officer at SE Health. “The potential consequences are very serious and significant, there could be a loss of service and access to things like portals or websites. There’s also legal and regulatory liability that can result in reputational risks.”

“Approximately 3.4 billion malicious emails are sent daily, an example of what makes us vulnerable to this is our cognitive load,” says Professor Milena Head, who is also Director of the McMaster Digital Transformation Research Center. “During the day we’re busy multitasking and working on several different things, so when we get these malicious messages, we’re engaged in another task. So, our multitasking, and how much cognitive effort we’re using, can affect how we may potentially react and how accurate we are in assessing those malicious messages.”

“What people may not think about, is using the same ID and passwords for all of their various logins, because as soon as there is a breach in one place, all of your user IDs that are paired with those passwords, are now out in the world,” explained Gayleen Gray, Associate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at McMaster University.

“Everybody has to take responsibility for their own cybersecurity, it’s not just something that resides with the security team or IT department within an organization — cybersecurity is not a one size fits all approach,” says Head.