New Brunswick’s Cybersecurity Opportunity
FREDERICTON—How safe is your personal data? Your credit card number, social insurance number, health records and bank information? Here’s a reality check: it’s probably not as safe as you think.
Every day, hackers around the world are trying to break into company websites and data records, seeking out private information to sell on the black market.
David Shipley, a cybersecurity expert at the University of New Brunswick, has seen it firsthand. “In a peak time last year, we were getting as many as 145 attempts a second to breach our network in Fredericton,” he said.
Hackers are professionals, not just kids hiding out in the basement.
“These guys are highly organized, they have HR departments, and they go to work in suits. They make hundreds of millions of dollars each year,” said Shipley.
Shipley took a circuitous path to cybersecurity. He left a career in journalism in 2008 to join the marketing and communications group at UNB. Then in 2012, when the university was hit with a major attack by a hacker group, he was actively involved in managing the response and clean up.
“I sort of fell in love with it,” said Shipley.
He’s now part of UNB’s IT security team and speaks to groups and conferences around North America. “We have been recognized to a certain extent as being on the leading edge of thinking about cybersecurity in a holistic way.”
UNB is also where Q1 Labs was born. From there it became a quiet star in the cybersecurity world, until it was acquired by IBM in 2011 in a deal rumoured to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today IBM Security‘s operation in Fredericton is a key part of the company’s global security strategy, providing support for more than 1,700 customers around the world.
And UNB is also home to the Information Security Centre of Excellence. Its researchers include Dr. Natalia Stakhanova, New Brunswick Innovation Research Chair, and Dr. Ali Ghorbani, the Dean of UNB’s computer science department.
That research expertise, along with the success of Q1 Labs, gives New Brunswick an advantage says Shipley.
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“You look at these cybersecurity firms and the money they have, they don’t need job subsidies. Yeah, it might not hurt, but what they are looking for is access to talent, access to data, access to places to refine their products,” he says.
“It has the potential to be larger and more impactful than what Frank McKenna did with call centres, and longer lasting.“
With the industry expected to be worth $600 billion by 2023, many players are getting into the game. There are successful companies in Silicon Valley, of course, but places like Ontario, Colorado and Michigan are all jockeying for a leadership position. If New Brunswick wants to be part of that opportunity, it needs to move quickly.
“To do that New Brunswick actually has to lead,” said Shipley. “We have to make ourselves the most secure jurisdiction and we have to be known as that. That’s how we identify ourselves as the Silicon Valley of cybersecurity.”
New Brunswick premier Brian Gallant is also bullish on the opportunity.
“There is a lot of potential for growth in the technology sector,” said Gallant in a recent speech in Fredericton. “One of those opportunities is a cybersecurity cluster in New Brunswick.”
Gallant has promoted the province as a cybersecurity centre of excellence at conferences and with industry leaders, including during a recent visit to San Francisco.
“The estimated annual burden from cybersecurity violations around the world is between $400 billion and $500 billion, and it is growing every day,” notes Gallant. “New Brunswick has the right eco-system to build a prosperous cybersecurity industry to provide solutions to this global threat.”