Toulouse: “Within five years, 50% of businesses in the region will be supported by cyberattacks”
Marc Sztulman, regional councilor of Occitanie and lawyer, chairs the very young Cyber’Occ structure which allows small and medium-sized companies to be trained against cyberattacks. A scourge that will grow in the region. Interview.
Marc Sztulman, regional councilor of Occitanie and lawyer, chairs the very young Cyber’Occ structure which allows small and medium-sized companies to be trained against cyberattacks. A scourge that will grow in the region. Interview.
The creation this summer of Cyber’Occ, which offers training for entrepreneurs in the region, seems welcome at a time of the explosion of cyberattacks?
It is indeed a structure created by the Region in partnership with Anssi and public partners. Cyber’Occ exists especially for very small businesses (TPE) or small and medium-sized businesses (SME) often helpless in the face of cyberattacks can contact us so that we can put them in touch with cybersecurity service providers in Occitanie. This is done in the form of workshops for business leaders, networking, exchanges with experts.
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Is the region and Toulouse in the first place particularly affected by computer attacks?
It is the most affected region of France, due to its very dense economic fabric. And VSEs and SMEs, which are a weak link in terms of IT security, are the most affected by the problem. We register nearly a hundred complaints per month. Most of the time, if these are small ransom demands, companies would rather pay than enter into a repair process. It is also necessary to distinguish between two types of attacks: those which are targeted, orchestrated by teams who take their time, and non-targeted attacks, executed by a simple computer robot, from a standard connection.
How do you explain that this scourge is not taken more seriously by the economic fabric?
Companies are often logical to say: I am too small to be targeted, but the robot, for example, makes no difference between its different targets. Cyberattacks are no longer a marginal threat. In the next five years, 50% of businesses in the region will suffer a computer attack and probably 40% will not recover, it could end up in the commercial court for liquidation. There is everything we don’t know, because the big groups never publish about cyberattacks.