Mr. Padraic O'Reilly:

The FBI, in co-operation with 60 industry leaders, recently came out with a set of recommendations around ransomware. The main recommendation was not to pay the ransom. This is a long-term strategy to starve criminal organisations. I am in full agreement with the previous speaker that they need to be made pariahs. Their infrastructure was targeted during the Colonial Pipeline attack here. Our Government was not specific about that but it did not deny it and retweeted some of the stories about the service being taken down. There was a bit of a scramble then from the criminal organisation with respect to what it had done and the consequences.

The ransomware task force is coming out with a framework to deal with ransomware. The framework is going to be modelled on the cybersecurity framework. I am a big believer in gold standards and best practices. I heartily support such a task force. Public private partnerships are how progress had been made in the cyber area of late.