Digitalization spreads inexorably throughout the vast majority of productive sectors and in the daily lives of citizens. With it, computer crimes grow. Although at a pace that is not always consistent, in this context investment and pedagogy on the importance of cybersecurity is also increasing.
An example of this growth can be found this week at Fira de Barcelona. Together with the Iot Solutions World Congress, dedicated to industrial innovation, the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress (BCC) is held. “With 72 companies and 40% internationality, the exhibition space has doubled,” says Tomàs Roy, director of the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia, about the BCC.
In the same Gran Via de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat venue, innovations such as bionic hands capable of interpreting the signals sent by the brain coincide with the systems that make this digitization safer.
According to the National Cybersecurity Institute, 60% of Spanish companies suffered some type of cyber attack last year. “It’s not that we are more vulnerable, it’s that we have more digitized assets,” says Roy. “Catalonia is a powerful ecosystem in cybersecurity,” he believes.
There are several Catalan companies in the BCC. One is Brontobyte, born in Girona in 2017. “Some firms see cybersecurity as an expense and not as an investment,” says Josep Guasch, one of the promoters. “Slowly, and through blows, awareness is growing. Now cybersecurity no longer sounds Chinese,” says his partner Lluis Foxà.
Guasch and Foxà are two of the promoters of the Cybersecurity Association of Catalonia (Ascicat), created just a few months ago and which is also present at Fira de Barcelona. From civil society, the aim is to create a “meeting point” between the different actors involved in this issue.
Some are new, like Barcelona startup Seven Sector. It takes advantage of the BCC to show a system that detects cyber attacks “at source, when the intruder begins to scan the system,” says its computer technician, Toni Serrano.
