Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)
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Question 595: To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs the number of and the records kept by his Department of attempted hacking or suspected cyber attacks or other malicious computer security breaches committed against his Department's computer systems. [1727/08]

Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)
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The Department of Foreign Affairs implements a range of security measures, including multi-layered firewalls, to secure its internal ICT network from the Internet. Furthermore, the design and implementation of the Department's network ensures that vulnerability to attacks from the Internet is minimised to the greatest extent possible. This infrastructure is reviewed on a regular basis taking account of specialised ICT security advice.

The Department receives on average 1 million email messages per month. Of these, approximately 1,000 are blocked as viruses and approximately 300,000 are blocked as unsolicited bulk e-mails (spam).

While the Department monitors and reviews the records of this security infrastructure on a regular basis for any evidence of suspicious or unusual behaviour/patterns and has a policy of retaining these records in accordance with industry best practice, it has not recorded any incident involving a successful breach of its network.