Polish your IP

CYBERPIRATES IN THE HANDS OF THE ANGREY TEAM OF OFFICIALS

Polish Cyber pirates beware! Your doomsday has just come!

In view of an increasing number of cyber attacks, for obvious reasons cyber security is of crucial importance to all individuals and to a country as a whole and its economic sector. What does the situation look like in Poland? Do we have necessary instruments and appropriately centralized entities responsible for cyber security?

In brief, in our country the entity responsible for cyber security is a special department of The Internal Security Agency – Department of ICT Security. As regards Internet providers, CERT Polska NASK (Poland’s first Computer Emergency Response Team) plays a leading role here. Nevertheless, the struggle against cyber pirates is a difficult one and tools employed to this end still imperfect.

 Therefore, the Ministry of Interior and Administration in association with other bodies is planning to implement a new Governmental Program of Cyberspace Protection for the years 2011-2016 in order to efficiently safeguard Polish cyberspace.

This seems great news considering recently reported staggering facts about Politechnika Śląska (Silesian Technical University). This Polish university has turned out to be a mine of piracy with over 20 servers used to download illegal files and in effect nicknamed ‘the European heart of piracy’.

The need for such a step seems all the more urgent as in Poland the authorities responsible for cyber security, of which we have got quite a few, are highly decentralized with separate units in different organizations and institutions. To put it in a nutshell, the entity responsible for security in cyberspace in Poland is the Department of ICT Security (The Internal Security Agency), as mentioned above, however there are also respective units in the Ministry of Interior and Administration, in The Ministry of National Defense and NASK. This has given rise to a decisional mess and is thus facilitating the dirty work to cyber pirates. It is beyond any doubt that an effective coordination is a must in order to fight this mess and see notable effects of particular units’ work. This is exactly the task of the new team of experts, the formation of which is predicted in the program. This supervisory body will be reporting directly to Prime Minister and it will include representatives of five ministries, the Police, the Border Guard, The Internal Security Agency. 

The Program is to protect entrepreneurs (e.g. those operating in banking and telecommunications sectors), institutions of particular significance for national defense and security as well as individual users. Interestingly enough, The program assumes both legal and organizational action, as well as steps of technical and educational character, the purpose of which is to enhance prevention and eliminate potential dangers.

However, the skeptics call this new idea ‘science fiction’ claiming that it will only give rise to more and more bureaucracy (of which in Poland we have got excessive amounts) through formation of a number of new workplaces financed by taxpayers.

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 We strongly believe that the organizational mess can do a lot of harm to cyberspace and hope that the skeptics are wrong. However, we will be closely observing the work of this new team curious of its effects hoping for substantial improvements in the area in question!

Author: Magdalena Solak-Michałkiewicz

For any questions on this article contact Michał Siciarek

Author: admin