Bosanac: Salaries of those in cyber security should be seriously increased

As a member of NATO, Schengen and the European Union, Croatia is increasingly interesting to hacker groups. Representatives of the Možemo party are demanding the immediate establishment of a civil body to combat cyber threats and a multiple increase in financial investment and salaries for those dealing with cyber security. They point out that this is in line with the announcements of the new European Commission, which announced a European action plan on the cyber security of hospitals and healthcare providers already in the first 100 days of their mandate.

Due to increasingly frequent hacker attacks, such as the one on the Zagreb Clinical Hospital Center and Split Airport, the Možemo party has requested that the central body for cyber security, the Institute for Security of Information Systems, become a civil body, and that the Security Intelligence Agency becomes its support, and not the CENTRAL body in charge of cyber security - as decided by the Government.

“This is something very unusual, because the question is, is the Security Intelligence Agency, in its nature which must be fairly closed, secret and have limited regulations on how they can work with civil agencies, the agency that will be the main shield against cyber-attacks,” asked Možemo party member and Member of the European Parliament Gordan Bosanac.

“The reaction to the attack on the Zagreb Clinical Hospital Center was not good, and we kept hearing that nothing terrible happened,” according to Bosanac.

“It was terrible and to this day we see the consequences. And naturally now days will go by, if not months, for everything to return to how it should be,” he said.

“We are currently using the SKAUT system, which the Security intelligence Agency is in charge of,” said cyber security expert Tomislav Vazdar.

“Through their cyber security center, which was established in 2019, it protects critical infrastructure and state institutions. Through certain sensors it monitors what is happening on information systems, or what is happening on the internet and what kind of attacks exist,” noted Vazdar.

“Our banks and other financial institutions have a very high level of cyber security, and somewhere we are still lagging behind,” explained cyber security expert Nino Talian.

“We are now witness to strengthening measures and, let's say strictness, in regulations and the legal framework which comes from the European Union and we copy here. But regulated sectors, such as banking, insurance and telecommunications, had to have certain measures implemented a long time ago, so that 10, 15 or 20 years ago they entered into this much more seriously and have much stronger teams, while the invest much more into this,” said Talian.

According to a Security Intelligence Agency report, 31 cyberattacks were recorded in Croatia last year, while in the first half of this year alone there were 23 attacks. State institutions and the Security intelligence Agency will not be able to pay cyber security experts as well as the private sector, warned the Možemo party, which they say will be a problem for public sector security.

Source: HRT