Madrid, October 16, 2024.- The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, Óscar López, announced this Wednesday in the Congress of Deputies a package of measures to combat telephone scams, a "fraud that has become too common", with cybercriminals pretending to be a bank or a public administration.
One out of every three inquiries handled by the National Cybersecurity Institute’s phone 017 (Incibe) has to do with fraud carried out via SMS, phone and email.
To stop fraud committed both by telephone calls and by text messages, Óscar López has specified the measures that the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Public Service will regulate during his appearance in Congress to present the general lines of his department in the field of Digital Transformation:
• Blocking by the operators of calls using numbers that have not been attributed to any service, assigned to any operator or awarded to any customer.
• Blocking by operators of calls and SMS of national numbering, but with international origin, one of the most common sources of fraud.
• Creation of a database, to be managed by the National Markets and Competition Commission, with users using alphanumerics in their messages (for example, the company name). Aquellos mensajes procedentes de entidades no incluidas en esta base de datos quedarán bloqueados.
• Prohibition of mobile numbering for commercial calls, so that citizens can detect that it is a fraud if they receive a call from such a numbering. In addition, the use of 800 and 900 numbers by entities that have these numbers assigned to make commercial calls will be generally allowed, so that, if a user has an 800 or 900 number saved in his agenda as the service of a company of which he is a customer, he appears as such when he calls him to make a commercial offer.
Óscar López began his speech by urging parliamentary groups to reach agreements, share proposals, listen to critical voices, in short, to “continue transforming the country, its economy and society with reforms that keep us at the forefront.”
The scheme that will be worked on in the coming years, López said, is based on three pillars: the development of technological capabilities, the promotion of Artificial Intelligence and its ethical use and the transformation of the Public Administration.
Technology Capacity Building
Firstly, the minister pointed out that economies need powerful infrastructure, high connectivity, talent, strategic production and digitized companies. And Spain, he stressed, “is part of a privileged position. Our country is the third in the world with the largest deployment of optical fiber, only behind South Korea and Japan; with 66% of basic digital skills, the Spanish population is 10 points above the European average, and, finally, in six years we have created almost half a million jobs in the professions of greater added value,” López said. All this, he added, is possible thanks to the promotion of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. “We have used 30% of Next Generation funds for the digital transformation of our economy,” he said.
Among the grants that the Government is allocating for the digitization of the businesses of the self-employed and small and medium enterprises, “we have a case of success that endorses us, the Digital Kit”. This program, said López, has granted more than 485,000 grants worth more than 2 billion euros; each day, Red.es receives on average more than 2,000 applications and these are processed in record time, three minutes. Before the end of the year, López announced, calls will be opened for SMEs with between 50 and 250 employees to help them incorporate integrated AI and cybersecurity solutions.
To implement these technologies, we also “launched the Consulting Kit, so that small businesses can hire advisory services”. According to the data provided by the minister, since June this service has already been requested by more than 10,500 SMEs and more than 3,000 grants have been awarded.
With the same objective of promoting the adoption of new technologies, the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service will allocate 100 million euros for the digitization of the media within the framework of the Action Plan for Democracy.
5G deployment
Another area in which progress will be made, the minister explained, is in connectivity, accelerating the deployment of 5G. “Today we can proudly say that we have 100% fixed broadband coverage,” said Lopez. “Anyone, wherever they live, has high-speed internet access at an affordable price. To this end, more than 2 billion euros have been invested in fixed and mobile connectivity and the satellite program Conectate35 has been launched.” One strategy, he explained, is completed with 5G deployment programs in municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants.
Data Space Strategy
On the other hand, the Minister for Digital Transformation has announced a Strategy of Sectoral Data Spaces, a project that will mobilize close to 400 million euros from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. This will be possible thanks to public-private collaboration, developing data spaces in Spain, such as the one recently approved in the Council of Ministers that will develop the FEMP; facilitating convergence with Europe and promoting technological competitiveness and the national industry.
In the technological field, López has highlighted the government’s commitment “to achieve technological sovereignty”. For this, he explained, the State Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) has been created, an entity that will group public investments in emerging Spanish companies with strategic technologies that boost the productivity of our economy. Despite its short existence, “it already emerges with such important projects as IMEC in Málaga, an outstanding center for chip innovation,” López said.
The SETT will execute the management of 16 billion euros of three funds: the PERTE Chip, Next Tech and Spain Hub Audiovisual. This will result in advances in semiconductors, in microelectronics, in studies that produce series and films or in medical technologies that improve the diagnosis of epilepsy, López said. Specifically, the Audiovisual Hub, which started in 2021, has already granted 1.6 billion in aid to the industry, and a second phase of the Plan has already been designed with 1.5 billion euros.
Projects like this “require talented people, so digital literacy is essential,” he said. The Ministry has earmarked 45 million euros to train more than 1,000 students in microelectronics and semiconductors through the chip chairs in Spanish universities.
The minister also mentioned the promotion, with 16 million euros, of 22 Cybersecurity Chairs with INCIBE and the ENIA Chairs, to which the Ministry has allocated another 16 million euros for the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence and its ethical use
Regarding the second pillar, Óscar López has indicated that the Council of Ministers approved in May the National Strategy of Artificial Intelligence, almost 1.5 billion euros for 2024 and 2025. At present, the minister recalled, Spain has one of the ten most powerful computers in the world at the National Supercomputing Center of Barcelona and has the Spanish Supercomputing Network; the challenge now “is to strengthen the capacity of the MareNostrum 5 so that it has an additional update that we can present soon”, he said.
Óscar López referred to the rapid evolution of AI and the need to advance in parallel in the development of computational and data capabilities. In this regard, it has announced “the development of a Sustainable Data Centre Strategy that will allow us to combine the digital transformation and the data economy of our country with the ecological transition and the responsible use of scarce resources such as water or energy”.
As for the Spanish Agency for AI Supervision (AESIA), the minister stressed that “it is preparing to assume and deploy 100% of its functions before 2025. Within the framework of the competencies of this innovative and pioneering initiative in Europe, we will soon launch the AI Sandboxes to support SMEs and startups in compliance with Artificial Intelligence regulations.”
Finally, the minister has made a brief review of the modernization of public services in which his Ministry is working and which will be the subject of exhibition at the appearance to present the general lines of Public Service.