At a time when Portuguese companies have been targeted by hackers, with the most recent case involving TAP, cybersecurity specialist Francisco Nina Rente believes there is a “giant lack of talent” to help companies and the government face the attacks.
“This is one of the problems of the sector (…), a global problem. In fact, the European Union has already published several studies on this shortage in the labor market and points to the lack of tens of millions of professionals in the coming years”, says Francisco Nina Rente, stressing that “the Portuguese academic structure woke up late, but it dawned” and there are currently “academic degrees focused and very well structured in the area of cybersecurity”.
Asked about the opinion expressed this Tuesday in the TSF From José Tribolet, professor at the Higher Technical Institute, that the important thing would be to create a kind of ASAE that would supervise the computer systems of the companies, the specialist says that it would be more relevant to strengthen the institutions that already do this work.
“There are already two authorities: one specifically for cyberspace security and another that indirectly touches on this issue. They are the CNCS -National Cybersecurity Center- and the CNPD -National Data Protection Center. They are institutions that by law have the mandate to validate, within certain areas, the cybersecurity capabilities that public and private institutions have”, he recalls.
The specialist who has been advising companies on computer matters for several years recalls that they have even imposed fines on public and private companies for lack of security, but the creation of an authority, as José Tribolet suggests, could help in this regard: “It is extremely important that there is a validation of how strong, correct and resilient the security of a particular company is, if it is an authority, better because it will have an imprint with another level”.
Regarding the recent computer attacks, the last one on TAP, Francisco Nina Rente says that there are no surprises, “the only difference is the media coverage that the sector is receiving”. The expert assures that neither the name nor the size of the companies involved are surprising because “this type of attack of this magnitude has always existed”. And he adds that today “the systems are interconnected and before they were not so complete in the organization and therefore the impact was not so great”.
Source: TSF
