Data breaches of federal IT systems occur an average of once per day, according to Treasury Board figures. An official said the most serious “incidents” are separate from thousands of attempted hacks that occur every minute of every hour..“Departments and agencies are responsible for reporting cyber incidents,” the board wrote in a submission to the House of Commons government operations committee. “In the last year there were a total of 308 cyber incidents reported.”.According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the board did not detail the data breaches. The figures followed March 1 testimony from a board manager who indicated attempted hacks were commonplace..“We do have the number of hacks,” testified Paul Wagner, assistant deputy minister. “The infrastructure and our environment are attacked daily, hourly and every minute.”.Wagner said systems are in place to deal with those situations. “There are more situations mitigated than we actually have to deal with as incidents in departments,” he said..Scott Jones, then-head of the federal Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity, said in testimony to the committee last May 31 that government IT systems were a target for hackers. “We defend the government of Canada, share best practices to prevent compromises, manage and coordinate incidents of importance and work to secure a digital Canada,” Jones said..“There have been so many data breaches, outside of the government of Canada I’m talking, that there is a tremendous amount of information available on each citizen, about all of us, on the web,” said Jones. “I know I’ve been the victim of data breaches when Yahoo was breached.”.Some 200 million Yahoo account holders had personal information breached through successive hacks in 2013 and 2014. The attacks were only disclosed in 2016 as the largest data breach in internet history..Jones did not elaborate on his loss of personal information, but noted he had not suffered any data breach off his federal email accounts. “We do take it very seriously, the need to protect that information,” said Jones..In a 2015 testimony at the Senate banking committee, bank executives said they faced attempted data thefts “many thousands of times a day.” TD Bank Financial Group mandated that employees change personal passwords every 30 to 45 days..“Organized crime and individuals attempt to attack us, probe us and figure out weaknesses in our defences many thousands of times a day,” Peter Milkman, then-chief of IT security at TD Bank,.testified. There “have been some rough nights,” he said, adding the bank annually spent “somewhere between $175 million and $200 million” on digital security..“We have people working with threat intel experts in China, experts in Ukraine, experts in dealing with Putin’s nephews in Russia and experts dealing with the sort of growing threat of cyber terrorists that we’ve seen around the board,” said Milkman..Matthew Horwood is the Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the Western Standard.mhorwood@westernstandard.news.Twitter.com/@Matt_HorwoodWS
