Canadian federal agencies successfully withstood the May WannaCry ransomware campaign, showing nominal impact from the attack, thanks in no small part to Shared Services Canada, a department that acts as an IT and cybersecurity services provider for the Canadian government, according to John Glowacki Jr., COO of SSC.
Created in 2011 by merging IT staff from 42 separate departments, the SSC provides data center and network services to government institutions while incorporating security best practices into the design of IT projects on an enterprise-wide basis. In so doing, the SSC serves as one possible integration model for medium and large organizations that currently practice disparate levels of cybersecurity among multiple divisions.
And apparently, SSC's response to the WannaCry incident demonstrates this model's benefits.
"There are some countries that did not fare well," said Glowacki, Jr., speaking Monday at SC Media's RiskSec Toronto 2017 conference. But in Canada, "We were able to respond extremely quickly compared to similar events around the world, similar events we've had to deal with before.
"This was for us a textbook case of why this works so well," Glowacki, Jr. continued. Because we had multiple departments, everybody knew their swim lane, they cooperated well, we executed quickly, we got on top of this... The fact that we were able to contain it and deal with it so fast was really quite something."
