And prior to this attack, BEL had already invested in beefing up its security systems back in 2020. The measures implemented played a part in their defense against Ragnar Locker. However, as the General Manager for Finance & Business Support explained, there is no guarantee against cyber attacks. But they are putting in additional security measures, as Fuller explained today.
Sean Fuller, GM, Finance & Business Support, BEL
"We are making very big moves in maintaining securing our networks from these types of events. I'll briefly tell you some of the things the committee is working on. We're continue to analyse the data was leaked to determine the extent of the exposure, because as the CEO said we want to be able to call every single person affected and apologized and share with them the exact extent of the information was leaked. But we are also continuing to engage very credible world renown cyber security experts to assist with the continual improvement of our security. We are also looking at critical system isolation to be able to protect customer data and to be able to maintain service reliability to our customers. As you know the business is providing energy service and electricity - we're making sure we isolate the necessary infrastructure to ensure that we can maintain that service reliability."
"We're implementing a whole host of additional monitoring detection and prevention tools and some additional firewalls or firewall configuration based on the recommendations of these security experts that we have working with us. We obviously will make some adjustments as to what type of information we keep on customers that is needed to open your accounts. There is no need, for instance, for us to keep an actual copy of your social security card once we confirmed you are who you say you are and you confirm this by your social security card and validation. So we'll make some adjustments as to what we actually keep on our systems on customers and contractors and other stakeholders."
"We're going to improve as we have been doing continually our incident response plan. We're going to be using the lessons learned from these two events; the hack between March and May and the actual data leak, to improve our incident response plan to be able to respond more efficiently and to be able to understand some of the things that is out there now that continues to change every day that these hackers use the tools and the techniques that they used and obviously we are going to continue with the penetration test and the incidents of compromise testing that we do to our system to ensure that not only we would have the level of assurance from our own work, but we will get independent experts from outside of BEL test what we've done and to tell us, you know what, there's a little area that you might want to improve or you are doing well here."
So far, inclusive of the cost of the assistance from CYE, BEL has spent $450,000 following the cyber attack.
