In 2019 the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre recorded $98M was taken by cybercriminals from Canadians. Globally, cybercrime is expected to reach $6 trillion by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The opportunity to syphon legitimate dollars from hard-working Canadians is really too attractive to stop.

It is also clear cybercriminals are not phased by a crisis, including an international health crisis. It is just the opposite. According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre more than $1.8 million was lost due to fraud associated with COVID-19 for the period of March 6 to May 25, 2020.

At the same time the demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to climb. In Canada alone, the Information Communications Technology Council’s research shows that approximately 50,000 cybersecurity practitioners will be needed by 2023, with an additional100,000 supporting roles opening up.

Some of the top jobs in these vacancies? Ethical Hackers, Vulnerability Assessors, Licensed Pen Testers, people with skills found in our Certified Network Defender, Certified Encryption Specialist, Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst and more.

At the same time the Government of Canada has been shoring up its cybersecurity strategy in order to protect Canada’s Critical Infrastructure. Ensuring that Canadians are protected in all facets of their lives, is essential. Protecting our banking, electrical grid, telecommunications, transportation as well as ensuring that we have a safe and secure water and food distribution network is key. With our certifications, you will have the skills, abilities and knowledge sets to work in critical infrastructure.

Hackers are bombarding the Bank of Canada with cyber attacks and the crack in the bank’s armor is its employees

This headline appeared in a January article on business.financialpost.com. The article went on to say that “millions of cyber attacks directed at the bank are blocked, but every year since 2012, employees have clicked on and downloaded tainted links that breach the Bank of Canada’s defense.

The Bank of Canada provided incident reports showing that 27 cybersecurity incidents were serious enough to warrant follow-up investigations since 2012. Many of the documents are heavily redacted, but in at least 17 cases, a malicious program was successfully installed on a bank computer.”

In the most high-profile cyber-attack in Canada since Chinese state-backed hackers broke into Canada’s premier scientific research agency in 2016, hackers used a distributed denial of service (DDoS) to crash Canadian federal government websites and e-mail for nearly two hours in June of this year.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement said, “There are incursions practically every day of every year. Usually, those incursions are unsuccessful … and so we always have to continue to make our sites and our information as impervious to attack as possible. Usually, that works. Sometimes, it doesn’t, and today was a day when it didn’t work,” he said.

In the most high-profile cyber attack in Canada since Chinese state-backed hackers broke into Canada’s premier scientific research agency in 2016, Hackers used a distributed denial of service (DDoS) to crash Canadian federal government websites and e-mail for nearly two hours in June of this year.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement said, “There are incursions practically every day of every year. Usually, those incursions are unsuccessful … and so we always have to continue to make our sites and our information as impervious to attack as possible. Usually, that works. Sometimes, it doesn’t, and today was a day when it didn’t work,” he said.