Brazil jumps to 18th position in world cybersecurity ranking

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The advance in technology puts security systems in check all over the world. Data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency linked to the United Nations, show that Brazil has evolved in the world cybersecurity ranking, jumping from 71st to 18th place in the organization’s evaluation, which analyzes 194 countries in cybersecurity governance.

Among the countries of the Americas, Brazil is in 3rd place.

One of the Armed Forces’ functions is to take care of Cyber Defense. Created in 2008, the first edition of the National Defense Strategy was tasked with managing this strategic area, but it was only consolidated in 2014 with the creation of the Cyber Defense Command (ComDCiber).

The first real project happened only in 2020, with the creation of the Military Cyber Defense System (SMDC), subordinated to the Army. It is where protection, exploitation, and cyber-attacks within national defense are analyzed.

In this sense, the military protects critical infrastructures, such as hydroelectric plants, financial systems, water, and electricity supply.

Data from the UN show that Brazil is well developed, as confirmed by experts.

In an article published by the Defesanet portal, Atech’s commercial manager, Anderson Kohl, points out that “the maturity of our cyber defense is clear, driven by constant training and the joint work of the Armed Forces with government agencies, academia, and the private sector – the so-called triple helix.

However, efforts are still needed to strengthen the system. In January of this year, the Ministry of Health’s National Network of Health Data (RNDS) received a hacker attack that caused a blackout of Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS) data in all states and municipalities. The platform was offline for over a month, and the invasion was never well explained.

According to cyber security and international relations researcher Eduardo Izycki, despite the advances, there is no integration between all civilian or government military agencies, creating insecurity.

“In part, some of the security problems stem from that. People have good initiatives in different places, but they don’t share them with each other,” he explains.

The Center for Studies, Responses, and Treatment of Security Incidents in Brazil (CERT.br), linked to the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI), has records of attempted cyber attacks from 1999 to 2020.

Since 2012, Brazil has started receiving many attacks, with the highest peak during the 2014 World Cup, when the country hosted the games. At the time, there were 1.05 million registered cases.

Izycki points out that the lack of integration hurts the system. “This integration even happens during big events. But after they are over, you don’t see it anymore.”

The fact that the entities are decentralized also does not allow them “to gain scale, to do training for the entire federal government.” According to the expert, the vision of all incident handling teams is lacking.

In the January issue of Military Engineering magazine, Army researchers showed ways to improve the government procurement system.

They suggested agglutinating services that have to do with the same themes to facilitate navigability and how to give more transparency to public spending.

But so far, none of the suggestions have been implemented.

INVESTMENTS

In 2019, a survey by Senator Esperidião Amin (PP-SC) showed that the budget proposal for 2020 in the area was only R$19 million (US$3.7 million). According to the parliamentarian, it is “a dramatic picture that exposes the country to enormous risks.

For him, the budget in the area should gradually increase until it reaches R$120 million in 2023. However, the amounts allocated to the activity in the Ministry of Defense are currently nebulous.

On the other hand, in the civilian environment, data from the PwC Digital Trust Insights 2022 survey show that global companies are aware of cyber-attacks.

According to the survey, most organizations surveyed (36%) intend to increase their data protection budgets significantly.

With information from Correio Braziliense