TD Bank Joins the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity
One of Canada’s biggest banks is looking to lend a hand to help increase cybersecurity throughout the country.
TD Bank has announced they will be a founding corporate member and the first domestic bank to join the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC). The CIC was started in early 2017 and is located at the University of New Brunswick’s Fredericton campus.
“We are building a digital bank for the modern customer,” says Jeff Henderson, EVP and CIO at TD. “As the digital landscape evolves, we will continue to invest in technology partnerships and talent so that we can deliver innovative experiences that our customers can trust and rely on. The University of New Brunswick is fast becoming an international centre of cybersecurity excellence and we look forward to working with its multidisciplinary teams on real-world problems while growing our technology talent base.”
TD’s goal with the partnership is to help support their ongoing investments in tech talent and to co-develop new cyber risk management protocols. The CIC is a multidisciplinary training, research and development institute that works with researchers in multiple fields, as well as other national and international centres.
The centre also publishes applications and research projects, such as the CICFlowMeter, a network traffic flow generator and analyser; or Canada’s Honeynet chapter, an international non-profit security research organization that looks to gain insight into the security threats, vulnerabilities and behaviour of attackers. Honeynet also investigates tactics and practices of the hacker community in order to share some lessons with the larger IT community as well as academia and law enforcement in Canada.
“On the list of security issues that companies monitor, cyber threats have quickly moved to the top,” said Ali Ghorbani, director of the institute and Canada research chair in cybersecurity at UNB. “Our teams are developing next-generation technology solutions in partnership with leading industry players like TD, deepening defences against emerging cyber threats not just in Canada but around the world.”
CIC houses several cybersecurity graduate students who will work directly with TD’s technology teams in order to develop and launch new threat assessment methodologies and algorithms. Students and researchers have published dozens of papers and books on cybersecurity so far and spoken at conferences around the world.
The CIC is currently still onboarding new corporate and strategic members and looks to be a leading national cybersecurity organization by 2021.
Cybersecurity is one of the most important operational initiatives companies can invest in as they scale and grow into the future. The Bank of Canada shared their 2018 outlook for cybersecurity late last year and focused on how banks must be more cautious than most, while shocking reports show that up to nine out of 10 companies were breached by cyber attacks in 2017.
