Mr. Padraic O'Reilly:

It is a pleasure and I thank the committee for asking me to contribute. Turning to the queries, the why aspect is complex. The simplest answer though is that data are valuable. Hospitals are being hit over here as well. I refer to reputational concern. The last time I was over in Ireland was in 2017. I met with the Minister who then had responsibility for communications, and he told me that he wanted Ireland to be the primary cybersecurity centre for all of the EU. Therefore, I can understand reputational concerns in that context, but everyone is getting hit. This is a global problem and these criminal actors are inside states which often do not police their activities. These are criminal organisations, but they punch a clock. Their members show up in the morning and work. They are professionals and are criminals. They are very disciplined at what they do and they know what they are after, and that is data. Health data are very valuable, and the organisations concerned are inclined to negotiate if their data are stolen. Such a theft exposes private information and those are valuable data, and there are now even double ransom strategies.

The criminal organisations are growing in capability and the aspects of why this is happening are also connected to the technical level. There are software vulnerabilities, remote desktop protocol vulnerabilities and all manner of things that hackers can do. Hackers can log on to a website to look for Internet protocol, IP, addresses and do any number of things to breach systems and they will continue to do that. We have a national ransomware task force over here which produced recommendations. Ireland's firm stance on non-payment of the ransom is very impressive. I state that because many of the companies here that are compromised get into quick negotiations and often publicly say they are not going to pay the ransom, when they have already paid it. Those are some of the elements explaining why this type of attack happens.