On a sunny and beautiful Saturday, the Apprien and PHZ teams gathered for the annual cyber security day at the picturesque Långvik Wellness and Spa resort in Kirkkonummi. The idea of the companywide cyber security days are to remind us all, no matter what is your job description, about the importance of the cyber security and brush up our knowledge about the company practises and different levels of the security we have in place. We also usually have someone outside the company to give us an in depth key note on trending cyber security themes. This time we had the pleasure to welcome Professor of Practise Dr. Jarno Limnéll from the Aalto University to talk about the cyber threats and how to prepare for them.
One might wonder, that what the heck the Rhinos and Swans in the headline has to do with the cyber security subject: well the answer is simple, those are commonly used metaphors for different events that typically or quite seldom occure, but are still something that we should prepare for. Term Black Swan might be the most common of these two. Since usually Swans are 99% white, it is really rare to encounter with black ones. Never the less they still appear, and actually some evidence shows that somewhere between 5% up to 7% of the Swan population might actually be different colour than white. Gray Rhinos instead are events, that are statistically quite realistic to happen and have significant influence on our life, but for some reason we have neglected the preparations for them. These might be Tsunamis, global pandemia, big blackouts in electric grids or labour strikes. Swans might be so seldom that huge efforts to prevent them are too costly and worthless to uphold, but the Rhinos are most likely to happen and their effects are so big that we should focus on preventing them or at least plan how to minimize the effects and maximize the damage control. This is definitely something to consider and as Professor Limnéll highlighted: 43% of Finnish companies said that their business would not survive if they would not be able to access internet in 24h hour / one day (survey 2019) .
During the course of the day our legal counsellor Mr. Asmo Esser talked about the current situation with GDPR in Europe and we went through some latest cases to realise that privacy related breaches and how companies handle our information are actually increasingly responsible for cyber crimes and business risk for all companies in Europe, no matter of the line of business or size. Our founder Mr. Antti Hätinen, Mr. Ville Välimäki and Mr. Skylar Kong spoke about our own internal security processes and learnings how certain customers of PHZ handle their own cyber security. Then our occupational safety and health manager Mr. Kalle Alanen talked about the effects of remote work for cyber security and how to guard your work and private digital surroundings.
The seminar day ended with the key note speech from Professor Limnéll about the current trends in cyber security, different threats and way of trying to influence us via different digital channels. Deep fake videos, integrity of the data and AI based segmenting are already widely in use for both governmental operators and private companies. But are there any realistic technical solutions to fight against these threats, probably not, but what could be the best way to prepare: education, media literacy and awareness. The more we know and the more we can question different sources and messages and the better off we are. Also, Professor Limnéll raised a very good question at the end of the key note: should we aim to digitalise everything? If not, what should be left out. Digitalisation is tool not the goal itself as he aptly said.
With these questions and heads full of new ideas how to be aware of different cyber threats we went to have fun Långvik games and since in Finland we definitely had sauna and spa and ended the fantastic evening with a superb dinner at the Långvik Kekkos-lounge!