My biggest fear today is around the collective threat of all of the smaller compromises that are going on, or the number of small compromises that are used to then gather information that is leveraged in attacks against the banks and other online service providers that are out there.
When you add that small piece from each offence together, it creates some pretty significant numbers. When you talk fraud in general, and just look at seniors in 2017, and realize that there is 22 million dollars' worth of actual reported losses in the small number of reports that we get, that's a staggering number. You have to understand that has a significant impact on all of those individuals.
Gathering that information together, better understanding it and collecting the technical information that allows for investigation of those things is where we're going to have a bigger impact on Canadians. Also, it's important to move beyond just the security, and when we think of large corporations and the amount they invest in cybersecurity, it's appropriate. The attack platform that's out there, the number of criminals around the world who can now reach across the Internet to cause that harm is something they all should be concerned about.
Obviously, we're not on the defensive side; we're on the investigative side. We need to have the appropriate balance between the two in order for us to be able to both protect Canadians from a security perspective and pursue the people who are responsible for it. When we just do security, that allows the criminals to still be out there, to still commit their crimes without repercussions. We have to have an effective investigation going after them.
It's the same as a physical bank robbery. We would not just make banks more secure and throw every armed robber out on the street. We need someone to pursue them, and we have to do that in collaboration.