Every day we hear of another ransomware or cybersecurity incident impacting a Canadian company or institution. With artificial intelligence tools becoming more commonly available and powerful, we are seeing the level of risks and impacts accelerate.

Francois Guay, Founder of the Canadian Cybersecurity Network, believes that Canada’s very quality of life will be impacted, and that technology investments and solutions alone will not spare us from this result. According to a study by IBM, 95% of cyber security breaches result from human error. This mistake is so overwhelming in cybersecurity that 19 out of 20 cyber breaches result from human error.

As cybersecurity attacks becomes a military and a state sponsored activity for economic gain, the impacts and the size of the attacks are going up in scale. Expectation is that more of Canadian infrastructure services like water supplies, gas and electricity grids could be more heavily targeted moving forward. Imagine waking up to no heat in the middle of February, or your bank accounts not being available for weeks. Although these may seem like doomsday scenarios, the reality of these happening in the coming years is very high.

Technology vendors, love to say their solutions solve cyber problems, but they are only partly right, much of the solution lies with all of us accessing and using the internet and its distributed services in a cyber safe way.

Israel, a country where war has been a constant, is progressively ahead of most countries in educating its citizens to be cyber aware. Partially due to having everyone participate in military duty as well because of internationally recognized programs like Magshimim a national cyber education program that creates opportunities for youth in the periphery to excel in cyber-tech.

Canada should not wait, nor copy existing programs that may not fit Canadian culture and needs but build out and fund a consistent national program with federal/provincial jurisdictions to educate all our youth and older populations as well, on the need to be more cyber aware and its potential impact on our economic and future prosperity. The risk in doing nothing or very little is to have known crimes were going to happen to certain individuals and not warning them in advance. In this case, the Canadian public is the victim, left to their own devices.

Francois Guay is the Founder of the Canadian Cybersecurity Network, Canada’s largest cybersecurity member network with over 35,000 members and the Founder of Canadian Cybersecurity Jobs.