Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 December 2021

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection
Chapter 9 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 10 - Management of Social Welfare Appeals
Chapter 11 - Controls Over the Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment

9:30 am

Mr. John McKeon:

They are mainly in place. There are still some to be distributed. The Department takes information security incredibly seriously. I think we were probably the first Department to get information security, cybersecurity, accreditation from the ISO. We had a number of very serious cyberattacks during the year which we successfully repelled. They did not make the news because we take it so seriously. That was the approach we took. The approach of using that remote access protocol was, to use one of the terms of the moment, an abundance of caution. The risk was actually probably very low in truth, but we do not tolerate, to the extent we can, any risk around access to data.

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