On May 21, our intelligence expert Ray Boisvert presented the keynote address at ARC Group’s annual seminar in Toronto, discussing new era risks and realities of cyber threats today.

Ray is a former national security insider and well-respected thought-leader in the Canadian security space, helping businesses understand and manage risk-mitigation strategies and solutions. His expertise is rooted in more than 28 years with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), from which he retired in 2012 as the assistant director for intelligence.

At the seminar, Ray discussed his increasing worries about cyber and insider threats that are insidious, pervasive and undermine our future prosperity. And, these threats are affecting the private sector far more that government, security or defence agencies because that’s where the intellectual property is, identities reside and monetary pieces are found.

Attacks are occurring and happening at a rate and a level of sophistication that organizations are increasingly defenceless against—71 per cent of organizations that were targeted for a breach, were successfully breached.

Ray warns that even though certain organizations believe that the nature of their work or their public profile don’t warrant an attack worth preparing for, those beliefs may be found to be erroneous because defenceless organizations will ultimately be more likely the pathway to attack to another firm, similar to a contagion or a virus or a flu. You may never get the symptoms, but you could easily pass it along to others because you left yourself defenceless—the same reality lives in cyber.

Cyber defence is not just something one can solve through writing a cheque—it’s something that has to be part of an organization’s risk registrar.

The summary video below is courtesy of the ARC Group.