Vanguard Magazine

www.vanguardcanada.com AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020 39 CyBer I 'm a huge fan of fictional work Sneakers, The Stand, Digital For- tress, Cuckoo's Egg, based on what I would call prediction and "real- ity checks". In just a matter of days after the declaration of the pandemic, many of us at the VIP boot of command and operation centers have witnessed the consequences of it. Although we have all the best expertise out there for CO- VID-19, this micro-biological entity shut everything down without being an actual technological threat, ironic, right? Where fictional writers and creators imagined what pandemics would look like in their respective era or in a futuristic Épopée, our advanced 21st-century technology was not necessarily taken into account. As such, no one was ready for the impact on our communication barriers. That being said, I have been in the AV (Audiovisual) industry for more than 20 years. I have experienced the rise of vid- eoconferencing from its worst to its best performance - analog Centrex, ISDN, to IP-Based H323/SIP, then software-based using an all-digital system maintaining high-quality voice and video added to content sharing. Before video technology, we have been integrating telecommuni- cations using landlines, then VOIP as IP based network was finally the best path for the coming era. And with all the ad- vancements in firewall and VPN technol- ogy, I feel we are fortunate to be the smart monkey ruling this Earth. Soldiers of the human race, kicking doors, and heading into action. But through it all one thing is certain: isolation, social distancing, and being cut off from the outside world. But paradoxi- cally, cybersecurity will have to open doors to prevent the world from "ending". Fire- walls must be better than ever, and that is the dilemma. What better example of secu- rity flaws on a large public scale than what we witnessed with ZOOM? In April 2020, CBC described the event involving the software-based company as having numer- ous cybersecurity issues; people attending unsecured meetings, racial slurs messages and pornography images displayed during educational webinars and high-end gov- ernment meetings, wrong meeting and pin codes, and hackers getting into servers abroad and stealing more than 500,000 ac- counts sold on the dark web. That's one case, within the immensity of the Web, I am sure they are not the only ones who were in this position. And for others, like some of the Gov- ernment of Canada's institutions (CCCS, DND, CBSA, GAC, and others), cloud- based solutions like Office 365, had to be enhanced and arrayed widely to thou- sands of employees to maintain operations for workers at home. In a matter of days, with a snap of a few clicks, I.T. enabled the portfolios (which surprised a lot of people, especially in a department like National Defence), operating a multiple network environment, different classification levels, always working within that secured space where wireless is prohibited and cut-outs from the outside world is actually… a re- quirement. It is interesting to note, what DND de- veloped for remote workers was witnessed by our neighbour to the South. The US Defense Department demonstrated great results with their CVR (Commercial Virtual Remote Environment), allowing DoD tele- workers with secured unclassified capabili- ties such as chat, video, VMR, file collabo- ration, and data storage. CVR was ready for operation by March. By the date of April 15, user count went from almost none to 450,000 and reached 1.2 million by July. Where there is chaos there is reborn, yet nobody wished COVID-19 was real. I sympathize with all the families out there and colleagues who had to go through some terrifying moments with scary days and nights. That being said, we must learn from this situation. Going back to cybersecurity, we must embrace our technology and shift to the next gear. Like any supercomputer that man has built, we do not push it to 100 per cent in the first few years. We test, in- novate, analyze, perform maintenance, and upgrade. This pandemic is the exact same thing, on one end, here is the su- per computer, our body, COVID-19 is a biological virus threatening young people, adults, the strong and weak in the chain. And like any entity, we have to test, inno- vate, analyze, perform maintenance and execute upgrades to keep going forward and be tougher. On the other hand, a phantom menace of COVID-19 is cyber- security being exposed to hackers, virus, fraud, usage, and demand overload, and sadly shameless profiteering. Self-isolation, applying mandatory mask protection, and social distancing - isn't that just like a fix, a "software patch" we apply while we wait for the next big upgrade? That is the key lesson we must retain and learn to apply in cybersecurity. As we know, most of our telecommunication breakthroughs are now engaging IP-based network and we have been applying upgrades for decades. I believe that method is the right one, but we must not stop there, we will perform and become more effective to crush that threatening rising curve. It is interesting to look into social distanc- ing from a cybersecurity perspective, as it involves some of the most recent remote computer access system innovations. Large facilities that must engage cost savings, bet- ter space allocation, reduced risk of physical access - those are already integrating com- puter farm and cloud-based server to en- large the number of accessible systems with- out implementing more hardware onto the working environment and above all reduce the risk of unauthorized access by limiting the physical approachability. That is to say, if you can remotely access a computer system, you can access a telecommunication device, a PVR, a satellite monitoring station, yet what goes on the "NET" can be viewed and controlled remotely. We know the private sector is big on wireless and cloud-based systems, the job

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