British business leaders need to extend their cyber security defences beyond the threat posed by Russia to other states and criminal syndicates, one of the UK’s leading spymasters has warned.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Ciaran Martin, chief executive of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of the communications intelligence agency GCHQ, said that while Russia remained a serious threat to businesses, Iran and North Korea, as well as international cyber criminals, presented equal if not greater risks. IT security expetrs commented below.
Andy Norton, Director of Threat Intelligence at Lastline:
The UK needs a “cyber home front” initiative. It is in an Asynchronous Warfare situation, and the attackers constantly obscure their real intentions with a mosaic of apparently unstructured intrusions against any and all economic and political targets. This serves to dull our awareness to the overarching strategic goal of reducing western economic power, constricting political alliances and isolating individual nations.
The question that needs to be asked is “in a state of cyber warfare, what should we do differently?” and the answer to that question needs to be delivered to business leaders. Then, we might stop the death of a thousand cuts.”
Tim Helming, Director of Product Management at DomainTools:
Josef Williamson, Threat Intelligence Analyst at EclecticIQ:
“The next step from there is that businesses become more open in their intelligence sharing, putting collaboration at the centre of the fight against the evolving threat landscape. Standards are maturing, technology is maturing, and there is a big push from government to set up collaborative initiatives to ensure the public and private sectors are sharing insight on threats. Transparency is vital to success in business and embracing a stance of openness cannot only improve a business’s view of cyber threats, but can also fuel a wider cyber intelligence revolution.”
The opinions expressed in this post belongs to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.