Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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215. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment his plans to increase the personnel and resources of the national dyber security centre in 2019 in view of the increase in the workload of the agency over recent months; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [51258/18]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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While my Department does not release specific details in relation to the staff or precise funding allocated to the National Cyber Security Centre for operational security reasons, in Budget 2018 additional funding was secured for additional capacity in the NCSC, both in terms of personnel and additional technology.

Further recruitment into the NCSC was undertaken in 2018 and is continuing, including a number of new roles focussed on addressing the responsibilities placed upon the State by the Network and Information Security Directive (NISD) which was transposed earlier this year. It is anticipated that the NCSC will have approximately 30 staff by the end of Q1 2019 and the resourcing requirement will be reviewed in the context of the next Cyber Security Strategy, work on which is underway.

The NCSC has developed significant capacity in recent years, and now has a resilient separate infrastructure with separate secure email and file storage, and has developed an automated incident response platform enables incident responders to investigate, collate and track incidents on an ongoing basis.

The NCSC has also established a Threat Sharing Group and developed an Advanced Persistent Threat Group analysis and tracking system and the Advisory System now has over 130 members including Government Departments and Agencies, the Financial Sector, Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) providers and other Operators of Essential Services (OES), and has an SMS alerting system. The CSIRT within the NCSC received its international accreditation in 2017 from the body known as TF-CSIRT.