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The Malta Independent | Thursday 7 May 2015
The new Parliament: the facts behind its data network Efrem Borg Malta Information and Technology Agency (MITA) was engaged to design, facilitate the procurement process, implement and commission a comprehensive wireless and wired data network within the new Parliament building at City Gate, Valletta. Separately, but related, MITA was also requested to assist the House of Representatives (HOR) in the migration process from its offices at the Grandmaster’s Palace to the new Parliament site. The data network deployed at the new Parliament building, allows network hosts, consisting of workstations, laptops and tablets, to communicate and access ICT services hosted on-site, at MITA’s Data Centres and on the Internet. The clients who will make use of the wired and wireless network include HOR personnel, Members of Parliament, civil servants and guests visiting the building.
Apart from legacy services, the data network at the new Parliament also caters for the connectivity of ancillary services such as closed circuit TV camera systems (CCTV), building management services, video conferencing, audio/video streaming and VoIP telephony. Per requirements some suppliers were provided with VPN access to facilitate the remote management and monitoring of the services they manage, providing the new Parliament immediate support in case of faults occurring on systems interfaced with the network, along with ease of routine maintenance. The new Parliament building network is composed of approximately 1,500 data points spread across the five floors within the two blocks. Five full size network cabinets located in three distinct geographically dispersed distribution facilities host all the network communications within the site. The active network components consist of a number of enterprise-grade firewalls, routers, switches, wireless controllers and wireless access points. Throughout the design stage of the project, MITA has strived to embed four key principles in the network design: • Flexibility – allowing the
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The Malta Independent | Thursday 7 May 2015
Roderick Spiteri Roderick Spiteri is Marketing and Communications Manager at MITA and editor of Malta Independent ICT feature
The Malta Independent ICT Feature
E
arlier this week the new Parliament building was inaugurated and the first sitting was held. In today’s feature we meet with Ing. Efrem Borg, who together with a team of professionals, was responsible for the
network infrastructure (wireless and wired data network) at this new site. They also assisted the House of Representatives in the migration process of their offices. We also look at new software that is being deployed in various financial institutions that is able
to confirm your identity by your voice over the phone. The aim of such measures is to defend against the increase in identity theft. All ICT Features are available on www.mita.gov.mt/ictfeature
Software that checks you’re who you say you are
Jason Deign
H House of Representatives to cater for its present and future network requirements; • Resilience – providing a builtin, high-availability design, offering minimal downtime for the business operation of the Parliament. Resilience is reflected in the design of external and internal links, network equipment and the wireless infrastructure; • Simplicity – a key consideration employed by the projectteam in the design stage is the simplicity to operate and maintain the network, whilst achieving the desired functionality; • Security – MITA considerers all of its sites to be sensitive and employs a number of security measures to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data transiting through its extensive network. Due to the nature of the Parliament function, additional security measures have been implemented, over and above those normally deployed. MITA approaches its projects using a project oriented methodology intended to ensure the delivery of the agreed tasks to the expected level of quality within the agreed timelines and budgets. The assigned project manager has managed the new parliament project using a matrix-management approach, formulating a project team consisting primarily of MITA’s networks team members and other service teams within the Agency. One of the challenges encountered throughout this project is the positioning of wireless access
points within the administration and chamber blocks of the new parliament site. The meticulous level of detail employed in the aesthetical aspects of the project by the Renzo Piano team of architects, meant that the projectteam had to be creative in finding solutions to achieve the desired technical performance in line with the aesthetical design considerations. Apart from the successful deployment of the project, the project team has strived to provide a seamless handover to the client and MITA’s operational arm by
organising a number of onsite information sessions. The delivery of the project has proved to be challenging and demanding, requiring a considerable amount of effort, teamwork, perseverance, dedication and commitment. It has, however, been a source of satisfaction and personal development for all MITA employees who have contributed to the success of this project. Ing. Efrem Borg is a Project Manager at the Infrastructure Services Department at MITA
oaxers beware: banks worldwide are using programs that can confirm your identity over the phone… and in seconds The financial services industry is bringing technology to bear in the fight against identity theft. Voice biometrics software that can tell a hoaxer just from their voice is being installed in banks worldwide and in many other large organisations that do business through call centres. Companies such as Agnitio and ValidSoft have developed systems that are so precise they can distinguish between the voices of twin siblings and can even confirm you are who you say you are when you are calling from a mobile phone with plenty of noise in the background. Major banking groups, such as Barclays, are deploying these systems to ward off mounting levels of identity theft. “While data on the financial services industry is hard to come by, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that 16.6 million people suffered $24.7 billion in financial losses due to identity fraud in 2012,” says Andrew Humber, Agnitio’s senior director of marketing communications. More than 13 million consumers suffered from identity fraud in 2013, according to the financial services research firm Javelin Strategy & Research. Pat Carroll, founder and chairman of ValidSoft, sees this figure set to rise in 2015, in particular because 2014 saw a massive increase in data breaches with many well-known institutions. “Identity theft has ballooned in 2014, which will be remembered as ‘the year of the breach’,” he says. “We know it’s endemic. The signs suggest 2015 is set to be even worse.” The problem with traditional security systems is that once a hoaxer gets hold of your personal details it is relatively easy for them to exploit your credentials online.
Much online security relies on ‘personal’ information that is readily available, such as emails addresses or phone numbers and passwords that are often fairly easy to crack. Voice biometrics, or voiceprinting, can help overcome these challenges because voices are almost impossible to fake. “We measure the sound coming from more than 30 different parts of your vocal tract,” Humber says. The sound produced by your nose, mouth, and throat is so unique that voiceprinting systems can not only usually tell it apart from anyone else’s, but can also identify it even through the muffling effects of a dodgy phone line or a bad cold. And to increase the level of assurance even further, call center operators can use voiceprinting in three different ways. For ‘text dependent’ identification, the caller has to repeat a specific phrase that is matched against previous recordings in a database. In ‘Text independent’ recognition, meanwhile, the system compares normal speech, such as the things you say in the first few seconds of a call to your bank, to a much larger bank of recordings. Finally, for the highest level of security there is conversational voiceprinting. This is where you establish your identity by reading out a specific phrase, such as a randomly generated one-time password sent to your mobile phone, when prompted by an interactive voice response system. The combination of your unique voiceprint and a code that only you could have is almost impossible to spoof, experts say. And
voice biometric technology allows banks and other service providers to check each voiceprint against a blacklist of known fraudsters’ voices. If for some reason the system still cannot confirm your identity, for instance because of problems on the line, the contact centre can always fall back on traditional methods of identification, such as ending the call and then calling you back on the number you have on file. This is bad news for criminals and good news for the rest of us. But the benefits don’t just end with cutting fraud. Establishing your identity is increasingly important for many more mundane tasks, from using online services to dealing with public sector bodies. In New Zealand, for example, the Inland Revenue has seized upon voiceprinting as a way of making it easier for people to access self-service options through its contact centre. “Inland Revenue needed to address the growing and unsustainable phone traffic to its contact centers, which often included low-complexity but time-consuming calls,” explains service manager, contact implementation, Jared Mortlock. “The uniqueness of a voice biometric, along with the fact that it can’t be removed, lost, counterfeited, or forgotten, made this an excellent solution and an advantage over knowledge-based verification or user IDs and passwords.” The Inland Revenue’s ‘Voice ID’ service went live in January 2012 and around 60 percent of people who call the department each day are enrolled with it. “We are proud to have more than 1.35 million voice ID customers enrolled,” says Mortlock. “This means that New Zealand Inland Revenue has the highest level of voice biometric enrolments per capita in the world. This is a significant achievement.” ValidSoft’s Carroll believes this is just the start, though. “The implementation of biometrics on Apple devices and recent announcements from MasterCard and Visa on the need for biometrics is all good news for us, it shows biometrics are now going mainstream,” he says. “This overall development may eventually add to a sustainable antifraud effort.”
Used with the permission of http://thenetwork.cisco.com Jason Deign is a Barcelona-based business writer, journalist and author. Besides writing, he is regularly interviewed by the media and has been featured in the UK’s Daily Mail and The Guardian, among others. Notable achievements include coining the term ‘Easyjet generation’ in 2003 and being the first UK journalist to document the rise of identity theft in 2001. Jason has worked with Cisco since 2000 and
became a global contributor to The Network in 2003.