As cyberattacks multiply in Switzerland, specialists accuse politicians of not doing enough. The latter refuse to take drastic measures so as not to “complicate the life of businesses”, but in the end, it will cost the economy more, warns one of them.
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The image of Switzerland will also suffer, says Stéphane Koch, specialist in cybersecurity and vice-president of the security company Immuniweb in an interview given Monday to the 24 hours newspaper Tribune de Genève. “Even the new laws on data protection or the law on information security do not go far enough,” he comments.
To make a difference, the Genevan believes that companies must be legally obliged to ensure their IT security, otherwise “they should be held responsible in the event of data loss or attacks”.
Regulating cybersecurity companies
Apart from companies, municipalities are also increasingly the target of cyberattacks – the case of Rolle last year is an example of this. Here too a big effort is to be made, judge Sébastien Fanti, data protection and transparency officer for the canton of Valais.
Unreliable and sufficiently controlled IT service providers partly explain this fragility, according to him. “If we look at the cases of municipalities victims of blackmail in French-speaking Switzerland, we see that they often worked with the same companies in terms of computer security”, he explains before calling for them to be regulated more.
On the cybersecurity company side, we temper: “It is not by regulating that we will be able to solve the problem”, comments Steven Meyer, president of Zendata. In his view, it is the role of agents to ensure that the service provider they have hired is trustworthy.
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