Monday, May 4th, 2020

ESBA brings together Cybersecurity and SMEs experts in its first Webinar Series session

On Monday 27th April, ESBA hosted the first edition of our new #ESBAwebinars series which was devoted to Cybersecurity and SMEs: Assessing Threats and Increasing Resilience.

Our President David Caro and today’s moderator Karen Clements (Representative of the ESBA Secretariat and Deputy Managing Director of LOW) were joined by an impressive group of panellists representing key sectors of the Cybersecurity ecosystem, including:

  • Jean-François Junger, Deputy Head of Unit, Public Services, DG CONNECT H1. Cybersecurity Technology & Capacity Building, European Commission

  • Fabienne Zwagemakers, Policy Advisor, Insurance Europe

  • Gabor Gyori, CSS Security Manager, EMEA, Microsoft

  • Miha Abrahamsberg, Partner and Insurance Broker, KRIK AKSUM and ESBA Member

Miha Abrahamsberg covered many aspects of the threats and challenges faced by SMEs in ensuring cyber resilience and gave some useful tips on cybersecurity awareness raising, including: holding weekly internal meeting with employees; establishing good anti-virus software and keeping other employees and managers informed or possible email scams.

Fabienne Zwagemakers followed the discussion by outlining how the Cyber Insurance market is still under development and how demands are mostly coming from bigger companies rather than SMEs. Fabienne also highlighted how EU insurers are working to boost the cyber resilience of SMEs in three main ways: raising awareness about the cyber risks SMEs face and then tailoring insurance coverage to meet customers’ specific needs; ensuring business continuity by helping SMEs minimise losses and recover from cyber incidents; and lastly advising policymakers on Cyberisks and how to best manage and mitigate them. In the light of the COVID19 crisis, Fabienne stated that COVID-19 has acted as a ‘stress test’ on SME cyber resilience and reinforced the need for having robust IT systems.

Gabor Gyori provided the audience with an all-encompassing overview of the cyberthreats landscape, the changes that the COVID-19 crisis has given rise to and laid down a set of useful tools and practices to be adopted by SMEs. Gabor reflected on how companies with VPN still struggle with the teleworking conditions imposed by COVID-10 lockdown restrictions; how cyber criminals still rely on traditional phishing practices and ransomware whilst adapting them to COVID19; the importance of backing up data and investing in education and multifactor authentication; as well as how SMEs are seen as cyberattack entry points.

Jean-François Junger concluded the panellist intervention by outlining the recent work of the European Commission in terms of cybersecurity, with a special emphasis on the Cybersecurity Act. In this context Jean-François highlighted the importance of certification mechanism for SMEs, the cybersecurity research activities under Horizon 2020 and the importance of the recently proposed Digital Europe Plan focusing on SMEs, AI, cybersecurity and high-performance computing.

Finally, ESBA President David Caro the webinar highlighted ESBA’s commitment to increase awareness and to ensure SME digital training. In addition, David reinforced the importance of public-private collaboration in finding the best cybersecurity solutions.

We want to especially thank our friends from Microsoft for sponsoring this event and all the attendees that joined us in the kick off of the ESBA Webinars series.

Do you want to join Edition number 2?
Subscribe to the ESBA Digest and follow us on social media to receive the latest updates and we will keep you posted.

Back