Sure, I can begin.
The internet “weather” is active. You're being hit non-stop by reconnaissance. This is basically the equivalent of people coming by and wiggling your doorknobs and trying your windows. That is happening non-stop—millions of times a second. That's just so you're aware of that. Mr. Jones talked about some of the protections in terms of blocking that initial set of reconnaissance, as we call it—basically those doorknob turnings or window checks. Those are happening non-stop, so those blocks happen. Those are in the trillions.
There are the protections that we have in terms of known threats. For anything that we know about that's a threat, we actually put in blocks to try to block those things from happening. That gets into billions of blocks, as well.
Then there will be other threats that actually get through. They run through analytics. We start to find out that this thing plus this thing plus this thing makes it look suspicious and worrisome. What do we have to do with that? Then you're into tens of thousands. Some of that is actually handled by automated analytics that block things as we're sleeping, 24-7.
Within our security operations centre, which is tier two for the Government of Canada, we're looking at close to 180 different departments. From all of that automated machinery that's happening and blocking millions of things a day, we get down to maybe a few hundred alerts that actually have to be looked at by humans. We look at those and triage them. Then, every single day, if we look at 1,100 incidents for the Government of Canada, we have about six or seven of those that turn legit.
Every single day, we're actually working on real, legit incidents with our partners here, as a team. When you say that cybersecurity is a team sport.... We see each other too often—weekends, evenings, all the time. Every single day, there are about six or seven things that we're actively chasing that become legit incidents. They are typically mitigated, but sometimes they go further than others and we have to work hard together to be able to prevent them.