 We have been having superb series of speakers about all the issues that are relating to justice and home affairs particularly in the last five years where things are changing so fast. But today we are particularly honoured to have a speaker who is known to many of us because he was ambassador here from the UK and he then has gone on to do other things since he was in Ireland. But in August 2016, Commissioner President Junker nominated our speaker today, Julian King, in the post of the Commissioner for the Security Union. Now this is a new commissionership and a whole new area of policy that has been given this kind of, I suppose, notoriety of having its own commissioner. Julian, as the commissioner, comes with a great deal of experience having worked both in the Northern Ireland office, worked in the director general of economic and consular affairs in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth office, British ambassador here, UK representative on the EU political and security committee. So obviously his choice by President Junker, he looked at his background and said this is the guy we need. Julian is going to talk to us today about the terrorist attacks and the growth in terrorist attacks and the growth in cyber crime and cyber attacks. Here in the institute we have been delving into that subject quite a bit with speakers because it is now a very serious threat to all our lives. And some of us who are a bit older than some of the others in the audience are sort of still very confused about cyber crime and how it works. We can manage our emails and we can manage a little bit of use of our computers, but the depths to which people can get into the computer systems in the world and cause terrorist attacks, cause electricity supplies to be cut off in whole countries. This is really frightening kind of stuff and it's almost stuff that we thought we'd never see in our lives. So Julian we look forward to hearing a bit about what your job is and where you think you can add to the safety and security of our people. Thank you, thank you very much and thank you everyone who's here. I'm going to use this opportunity then to talk about the two main security challenges that we face across the European Union which are as you said terrorism and cyber. Two days ago it was in St Petersburg that we saw the latest terrorist attack. Two weeks ago it was in London of course and the fact that the victims there for innocents and 50 injured came from 11 different countries I think demonstrates again that this isn't simply an attack on one country or another. One of the injured of course was Irish and another victim probably owes his life to the fast thinking response of an Irish woman who performed a CPR on him on the spot until the emergency services arrived. London was struck on the same day that in Brussels we were marking the first anniversary of the airport and metro attacks. France where I was until last summer, Belgium, Germany have all suffered in a two-year cycle of Islamist terror on European soil. These were attacks on our shared European values by people seeking to target and undermine our way of life. Of course the threat from terrorism is not new and many countries across Europe have had to deal with it in the past but the jihadi inspired threat from Daesh is different not only because it's global but also because of the way it targets our shared values and seeks to destroy our way of life. It's a threat that we must defeat. The risk in fact for terrorist attack is going to remain high in the coming months and years particularly as events in Syria, Iraq and indeed Libya are unfold. The prospect that some foreign terrorist fighters will attempt to return to the EU with the intention of planning and executing future attacks. Estimates vary but around 2,000 EU citizens who travelled to fight with ISIS remain in Iraq or Syria. Keeping tabs on their whereabouts and movements is going to be a key challenge for member states, law and order agencies and for the EU as a whole. And so too is how to respond to the new phenomenon of as you called it downstairs a low cost terrorism where as in London, Nice and Berlin all you need is a vehicle or a knife indiscriminately to inflict fatal injuries on innocent people and those charged with protecting our safety. Last week's attack fits into a pattern of behaviour which has been encouraged by Daesh via their online propaganda. It means the risk is not only about potential returning foreign fighters we also need to be vigilant about efforts to radicalise within our own communities to try to get vulnerable individuals to turn against our shared values and be drawn into violence. Indeed we need to learn from each of these attacks so that we're able to turn yesterday's terrorist success into tomorrow's terrorist failures. The recent low tech attacks in Europe are particularly difficult to detect in advance but there are some common factors most notably that their inspiration was transnational. Most of the perpetrators were EU citizens or residents who had spent time in Syria or attempted at least to travel there. A smaller number of third country nationals were involved in some of these attacks almost all of the attackers had crossed the EU external border at some point prior to committing their attack. In response at the European level we've moved to enhance security of our external borders with the revision of the Schengen border code which means that everybody coming in and out of our shared space will be subject to a systematic security check including EU passport holders. We're negotiating a new entry exit system to reinforce border checks for third country nationals a European wide passenger name record system will make it easier to detect the movements of foreign terrorist fighters and we've proposed a European travel information and authorization system, ETIAS, in order to gather information on people travelling visa free to the European Union to allow for advanced migration and security checks. We're working to join up our EU information systems to fight identity fraud and strengthen the hand of border and law enforcement agencies. As well as strengthening our controls of external borders and reinforcing the exchange of information between our law enforcement and security agencies we are also criminalizing travel to and from Iraq and Syria for wannabe terrorists. We're toughening the rules on money laundering which can help finance terrorism and we've agreed a deal on firearms which will remove the most dangerous military grade weapons from wider circulation and we've also broadened the scope of legislation controlling the sale of explosive precursors. So with these measures we are making it harder for terrorists to travel, to train, to finance themselves and to acquire weapons and explosives but we won't defeat terrorism with databases and legal frameworks alone. We need to prevent the hate mongers from inciting people to commit violence in the first place. Much of this work is best done at the local level led by grassroots and civil society organizations but we can and we will do more at the EU level to support these efforts and make sure that we share best practice. The internet is a fertile ground for radicalization. Data is on the front line of both our defence and our detection abilities and we need the cooperation of social media and internet providers to help to detect those being radicalized in their bedrooms. We've set up the EU internet forum to help ensure that illegal content for example promoting dash is taken down by the internet companies. The internet referral unit at Europol and I think you've had Rob Wainwright from Europol with you has actually referred tens of thousands of posts to the internet companies and enjoys a higher than 80% take down rate. So we need to continue to build on that cooperation and to scale it up because tens of thousands is good there are hundreds of thousands of such material out there and also to promote alternative positive messages. Frankly there's more that the social media companies need to do to play their part in this fight. After all if they can collect, analyse and sell data about us for commercial and marketing purposes using their algorithms they can do the same thing free of charge to help to counter terrorism. The internet provides the link to the other major threat that I want to talk about which is cyber. If you ask me to sum up the cyber security threat that we currently face in one sentence it would run something like this. Our society's dependence on connected technology is increasing faster than our ability to build defensive capabilities to protect it and ourselves. It's quite a sobering thought particularly when you factor in that the rate of growth of cyber crime over the next two years is projected to be greater faster than the rate of growth of the use of the internet. So the criminals at least think that they're on to a good thing. While we've all become addicted to our smartphones, tablets wireless printers, app control devices surfing the wave of rapid technological advances and enjoying the giant leap forward in information accessibility we have inadvertently been creating a massive vulnerability which cyber criminals and hostile states have not been slow to sport and to seek to exploit. When the machines that we watch for our entertainment become smart enough to watch us back it's time perhaps to pause for thought about where this journey from analogue to digital is actually taking us. As many as 21 billion devices used by business, consumers, you and me are forecast to be connected unsecured to the internet by 2020. Now we need to do something to change this and it needs to be a shared responsibility starting with individuals and going all the way up to international cooperation between the private and the public sectors. In terms of individuals, while we are all used to reading about cyber attacks perpetrated against big corporations and celebrities there is perhaps a certain complacency amongst us, the wider public that our lives will not be affected. But in fact what was once exceptional is rapidly becoming mainstream and the tentacles of cybercrime are starting to reach into the daily lives of us all. It's time to fight back. It is as often quoted and therefore unfortunately often ignored the fact that 80% of cyber attacks can be defeated by 20 simple actions of cyber hygiene. Basic cyber hygiene is pretty boring updating your software with security patches but the more of us that make the effort the harder the criminals will have to work. For example in January of this year security experts released data on the most commonly used passwords. To do that they looked at over 10 million that have been subject to cyber security breaches. Depressingly they discovered that 17% were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. In terms of the private sector we need to end the era of factory set security codes which is basically insecurity by design by agreeing EU-wide standards for connected devices and we need industry to invest in cyber security. The EU public-private partnership launched last year is expected to trigger 1.8 billion euros of investment in cyber security by 2020 which is excellent except that the US is spending 18 billion euros on cyber security in 2017 alone. Looking at the threat, Europol's serious and organized crime threat assessment of earlier this year reveals that almost all types of organized criminal groups are deploying and adapting technology with ever greater skill and to ever greater effect. It is now perhaps the greatest challenge facing law enforcement authorities around the world. The dark web, a collection of websites operating on an encrypted network hidden from traditional search engines and browsers is the criminal's bizarre where subject to the right introductions it's possible to buy the latest malware or to rent a botnet for fairly modest sums which can be used to launch a distributed denial of service attack that can and has paralyzed a whole network. So while the threats posed by cyber aren't entirely new what is changing is their scale and their diversity and the actors are not only criminals with ransomware, malware and phishing for profit but also state and non-state actors who see cyber as a valuable and deniable weapon. That's why at the European level we need to work on two broad fronts first to reduce the likelihood of attacks by increasing the barriers to them and reducing the incentives to carry them out second to reduce the impact of attacks through raising awareness and knowledge and through better system design. In practice that means working to raise awareness which is the first line of defence so talking about this problem is part of the solution. Tracing and prosecuting cyber criminals reinforcing resilience and security of our critical infrastructure and systems particularly where they are enabled by IT. Investing in research working with private sector and building international cooperation and capabilities. So just to finish a few words about the elephant in the room as I've said before in my view it's in everybody's interest that the UK and the EU continue to operate closely both on counter terrorism and on counter cyber. We have a shared analysis of the threat and a shared interest in fighting it. But just because we all agree on the objective it does not necessarily mean that it will be easy to achieve. There will be some legal and practical constraints to what can be done after the UK ceases to be a member of the EU. But we are undoubtedly better able to tackle these threats if we can find ways to continue to work together. On the wider issues raised by the UK's decision my colleague from the commission was here in Dublin about a month ago and I agree with what he said and how he put it. Ireland is a special case in the Brexit equation. The European Commission will take its very special interests to heart and will make sure that those interests are heard by everyone during the coming negotiations. That's the position and the commission is united in this approach to the coming talks. Thank you. Very much indeed and particularly for the ending of your speech there. We try not to have the whole thing just be about Brexit because this is a wider topic. I'm always amused here in the institute. We keep hearing new expression to hear people getting haircuts and washing their face to new one today, cyber hygiene. I hadn't heard that expression before and it's an everyday word and we all mind our own hygiene. Now we have cyber hygiene and I need to get hold and we all need to get hold of the 20 things to do. I will recall a very short story when I did a little bit of work in TV3 and it was around the time all this hacking was going on in the UK with celebrities and everything and they were all saying oh I said well it's easy done if people don't change the codes. I asked one of the journalists for her phone number and I then proceeded to show her how I could hack her phone because she had never changed her 1, 2, 3, 4. I phoned in, put the 5 in front of her number, got to her voicemail and then put in 1, 2, 3, 4 and said so-and-so is ringing you and has left a message he wants to meet you later and something else and she was absolutely appalled and she was a journalist who was working in the system and she hadn't changed so when we went around that room in the studio in TV3 there were about 3 people who hadn't changed and that was a very high percentage so I'm not going to ask anybody here who hasn't changed their code to put their hands up but if you haven't please as soon as you leave this room make sure that you have put your own particular number in and with regard to passwords we all tend to use the same ones very often the town we were born in or the town we're living in or the mother's maiden name and these kind of things so you just have to be careful about it thank you very much indeed for what is a warning to us all that life has changed somewhat