Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 30 January 2008
706 Deputy Damien English asked the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism 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. [1719/08]
Amharc ar fhreagraMy Department's IT Network is part of the Government Virtual Private Network (VPN) and, as such, is initially protected against intrusion by the VPN firewall. Beyond this level the network is also protected by the Department's own firewall system. This extensive firewall security blocks in the regions of 70,000 items of data traffic daily.
A log is kept by this system of intrusion attempts and alerts are configured to warn if any such attacks breach the network. The traffic which is allowed through the firewall is further filtered for so-called ‘spam' and the traffic which is subsequently allowed through that process is filtered for viruses and for content. No breaches of the firewall security systems in place by my Department have been made to date.
The National Archives, an institution which is also part of my Department, has had no recorded attempts of hacking, suspected cyber attacks or other malicious computer security breaches against its computer systems.
