Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 1 December 2022
Public Accounts Committee
2021 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection - Social Insurance Fund 2021
Chapter 10: Regularity of social welfare payments
Chapter 11: The recovery of benefit and assistance payments following compensation awards
Chapter 14: Classification of workers for PRSI purposes
9:30 am
Mr. John McKeon:
Our case was in February 2021. It was similar to but different from the HSE attack. It is the usual: you get a call at 3 a.m. on a Saturday to say that we are being attacked and your heart sinks into your stomach. As I said, we have a good team in place. We immediately isolated the equipment when we identified the attack and deployed high-grade virus detection and deletion software. The latter slowed down our network but was successful in protecting it. It is hard to say how close we came, but somebody tried and the measures we had in place worked.