Thank you for the invitation, Mr. Chair.
I am Rear Admiral Lou Carosielli, the Canadian Armed Forces cyber force commander. It is a great honour to be here today and have the opportunity to brief you on the outstanding work that our military and civilians do in the defence of Canada in the cyber domain.
Cyberspace is critical when conducting modern military operations and is recognized by Canada and its allies as a domain of military operations, a true war-fighting domain, which I will get into later on.
As such, the CAF relies on the force multiplier effect of technology-enabled communications, intelligence and weapons systems, which must be adequately secured and defended from cyber-threats. The CAF defends its own networks and information systems against cyber-threat actors and supports partners and allies as capacity permits.
Our adversaries have demonstrated sophisticated cyber-espionage and cyber-offence capabilities for use in competition, crisis and conflict.
Indeed, potential adversaries are leveraging and developing cyber capabilities to attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
In addition to the threat posed by foreign powers, a variety of threat actors with different motivations, such as cybercriminals, hacktivists, terrorist groups, thrill seekers, and insider continue to use increasingly sophisticated means to disrupt our networks.
The CAF cyber forces contribute to international peace and security through cyber threat intelligence sharing with allies and partners and through the conduct of full spectrum cyber operations as authorized by the Government of Canada.
For example, in response to Russian aggression in early 2022, the CAF immediately stood up a cyber task force to help Ukraine bolster its cyber defence capabilities.
Canada provides Ukraine with cybersecurity expertise, cyber-threat intelligence, software tools and technical solutions that allow them to better defend their networks against malicious cyber-activity.
The threat is not limited to Ukraine alone, and therefore, in response to a request for support from Latvia, the Canadian Armed Forces have deployed a persistent cyber task force to Latvia to conduct joint threat hunt operations to assist them in better defending themselves from threats and to demonstrate Canada's commitment to its allies.
Lessons learned from the experience in Latvia in detecting adversarial activities are being applied to better secure our own Canadian national defence's networks and therefore represent a significant return on investment.
Mr. Quinn and I look forward to your questions, Mr. Chair.
