News that two Canadian banks were hacked earlier this week with the account information of approximately 90,000 Canadians stolen has reignited concerns over personal data security
News that two Canadian banks were hacked earlier this week with the account information of approximately 90,000 Canadians stolen has reignited concerns over personal data security.
The University of Waterloo has experts available to speak on the issue cybersecurity.
Florian Kerschbaum - interim director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute
Kerschbaum is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science. Before that, he built the anonymization and cryptography research program at Europe's largest software vendor SAP. He works on data security and privacy and applied cryptography, i.e. how to keep data usable and protected.
“In the design of current systems, security breaches are inevitable. We need to work on principles that limit the impact of a single component or security control failing and being able to better predict the security of systems. The current practice of security is not based on scientific principles and we need to change that in order to reduce the number of news reports on security breaches.”
—Florian Kerschbaum
Hassan Khan – specialities include computer security and software development
Hassan Khan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He investigates the security of user authentication mechanisms on smartphones.
“The hacking of financial institutions is deeply unsettling for many reasons as they expose banking account information as well as other personal data, which could be used to mount other attacks in years to come. Security researchers have provided guidelines on the implementation of secure authentication on the web, so it will be interesting to learn if these are being bypassed or not followed.”
—Hassan Khan
