Telecom. IT: Romania has an estimated 1 bn internet-connected smart devices

Approximately 127 new smart devices in the world are getting connected to the internet every second, and Romania has around one billion already connected terminals, shows data presented on Wednesday by the director of the National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC) Dan Cimpean."If we also add all the platforms, all the systems managed by institutions, we get a rather complex and somewhat worrying global picture. Obviously, digital technologies come with a lot of risks related to the security of information, data, and critical or less critical infrastructures. I strongly believe that we have only one chance to address these risks and to successfully do this, yet only as an ecosystem. When I say ecosystem, I mean actors from the government sector, the business milieu - so the private, the academic sector, research & development, our international partners and allies. It would be extremely naive to believe that we will be successful unless we address the risks related to cyber-digitalization in this format", Cimpean told the 7th edition of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Forum (CIP Forum) - part of the ongoing Digital Innovation Summit Bucharest (DISB) 2024.In the view of the DNSC head, at global level, hackers are very well financed and their activity is geopolitically and ideologically driven. Also, the expert emphasized that estimations based on analyses show that a cyber attacker needs 13 hours and a half between the moment he steals the data and the moment he gets to exploit it."At this moment we believe that as a state, as an ecosystem, we are able to reasonably handle one major national level incident per week. (...) I strongly believe that everything digitalization and cyber security is intertwined and we must have the courage to launch many more projects. Let me give you just an example from the Directorate: we have 17 ongoing projects at the moment, projects on which we work in consortia, in partnerships with various organizations, either from Romania or from the European Union. We also have another 53 projects in preparation," said Cimpean.