City Of London Police Launch New Cyber Initiative For Square Mile

The City of London Police is launching a drive to make the Square Mile more resilient to cyber attacks, as the financial services sector sharpens its focus on defending against online criminals.

The Cyber Griffin initiative is being launched at the Investment Association’s first cyber security conference for the asset management industry — the sector the lobby group represents — in London on Tuesday. IT security experts commented below.

James Hadley, CEO & Founder at Immersive Labs: 

“It’s encouraging to see the City of London take a proactive stance toward cyber security.  A resilient cyber strategy is fundamental for the Square Mile to ensure business as usual. However, this can only be achieved via continuous improvement through identifying weaknesses, and up-skilling staff in order to plug the skills gap within an organisation.”

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Bill Evans,  Senior Director at One Identity: 

“I think it’s great that the City of London police force has launched a new initiative, the Cyber Griffin initiative, to help businesses in the Square Mile better prepare and defend against cyber threats – every little bit helps.  Unfortunately, in this case, the assistance really is just a little bit.

While the structure of the initiative is sound – threat briefings, intelligence sharing and response training – according to Parliament Street Policy paper, UK police have spent 1,320,341 GBP training 39,438 officers in the past three years.  That’s about 33 GBP per police officer or about 11 GBP per police officer per year… I can tell you that 11 GBP per year does not a cybersecurity expert make.

What’s needed is investment on par with the magnitude of the threat.  This includes a national, coordinated effort where the resources of government, including police forces, the intelligence community and security professionals from the private sector coordinate activity to share information and best practices to defend the data of the citizenry.”