New Unitec Cybersecurity Research Center Quantifies Online Threat

By Murray Knox

Last week, the Mako team and I attended the launch of the new Cybersecurity Research Facility at Unitec Institute of Technology here in Auckland – the first facility of its kind in New Zealand. Created in partnership with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), the facility will be a center of excellence in researching security and network-related topics.

Mako applauds the efforts of Unitec and NICT in creating this center to fill a need in both the security profile and workforce of our country. One of the areas important to Mako Networks’ continued growth is our ability to find technically skilled talent to fill roles on our team, and we think the Unitec facility will help by producing graduates with more skills in our specific areas of interest. We look forward to speaking more with the Unitec facility coordinators and graduates in the coming years.

Part of the presentation at the launch ceremony was a demonstration of the capabilities of the Network Incident analysis Centre for Tactical Emergency Response (nicter) system created by NICT researchers (click here for a demo). As an experiment to calculate the number of cyberattacks in the week preceding the facility opening, the team set up sensors to monitor 4,000 IP addresses in Japan and 2,000 in New Zealand. The team found that the New Zealand-based IP addresses racked up more than four times the number of attacks than those in Japan. That’s a serious difference, especially when factors like population and relative ‘connectedness’ to the wider Internet are taken into account.

We at Mako know that New Zealand is more susceptible to cyber attacks than most people realize, but we study this sort of information daily and are privy to data collected in the field by our Mako appliances. The figures presented by the NICT system correlate closely with the results of our own data mining. It’s fair to say that the presentation yesterday drove the point home visually for the attendees, and reinforced for us the necessity of protecting our home country all the more.

In his presentation, Dr. Hossein Sarrafzadeh from Unitec cited statistics from the Norton Cybercrime Report that said 72 percent of Internet users in Australasia have been cybercrime victims. The Norton report has been criticized by some for its reliance on self-reported data and being too alarmist. But when taken together with the data collected by the NICT researchers, it does confirm that the body of evidence is starting to mount: New Zealand needs to be aware of the cybercrime threat, and take steps to protect its businesses and citizenry.