It is evident that the commitment of the government of President López Obrador is to minimize the seriousness of the hacking of the systems of the Ministry of National Defense, for two fundamental reasons: to limit the impact of the revelations that have emerged and that will continue to appear from the files that the intruders obtained from that dependency; and avoid talking about the damage caused by strict austerity, which has dismantled or destroyed a good part of the capacity of public sector institutions, which in fact exhibits a very limited conception of government tasks. In this collaboration I will refer to this second aspect.
For example, in November 2017, the government of President Peña Nieto published the National Cybersecurity Strategy, which provided for a series of actions through eight transversal axes, to address the challenges in different areas, which included the aspect of capacity development , the necessary institutional coordination and the adequacy of the legal framework, among others. Reviewing the available public information, it would seem that the effort was just that, in a planning job, which was not taken up by the current administration, or at least, not with the expected breadth and depth.
In the 2023 Economic Package, the government of President López Obrador requested an amount of 60 million pesos from the Chamber of Deputies for the General Directorate of Service Management, Cybersecurity and Technological Development, still attached to the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection. This represents 0.0007% of the total budget of the public sector for the next year. Of that amount, 58 million pesos are for personal services, that is, for the payment of salaries of public servants and other benefits.
Comparisons are odious, but to give us an idea of the abyss that separates us from the vision that other governments have on the importance of cybersecurity, we can review the extreme case, that of the United States government, which by 2023 plans to spend 17 1.5 billion dollars in cybersecurity, which is equivalent to 0.3% of the total budget proposed to the Congress of that country by President Biden. For its part, a reference a little closer to the Mexican reality, but of course still distant, is that of the Spanish government. In March of this year, it announced a cybersecurity plan for which it plans to allocate nearly 400 million Euros per year for the next three years, which is equivalent to 0.1% of the total budget proposed to the Parliament of that country.
The budgetary disregard for cybersecurity of the 4T government is part of a context of the very low priority that technological aspects have had until now on the government agenda. For example, the little importance that this government gave to the construction of a digital agenda was made clear when practically halfway through the six-year term, the National Digital Strategy 2021-2024 was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation, which cannot be considered as a serious digital agenda, or at least, attached to the best international practices.
To this must be added that anecdotal statement by President López Obrador when in July 2020 he suggested that the public servants of the Ministry of Economy share their computer equipment, given the withdrawal of a significant number of these due to austerity measures. Besides, even though there are various legislative proposals on the subject both in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies, it has not been in the interest of the Executive to promote its discussion.
So, between the fact that the current administration despised what was done in terms of cybersecurity by the previous administration, the low budget priority given to the issue, the lack of seriousness to propose a serious digital agenda and the lack of interest in promoting the discussion of proposals in the Congress, it was only a matter of time before a hack like the one suffered by SEDENA occurred. By the way, yesterday the Eighth National Cybersecurity Week began in the Senate of the Republic, sponsored by the National Guard. It seems like a joke.
*The author is an economist.
@GerardoFloresR
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