Government releases 'The UK Cyber Security Strategy.'
The UK government released its 2011 Cyber Security plans to protect and promote the UK in a digital world.
The new strategy reports to increase its focus on cybercrime, and place a spotlight on maintaining the economic and social prosperity found in the cyberspace. It's clear to see that Whitehall is definitely moving in a positive direction in terms of getting to grasps with these ever-growing complexities of our global produce. From the sights of it, it's not going to be easy; but it's a long-term set of tasks and incentives that will benefit both private and public sectors.
The objectives of implementation come in four objectives:
- Tackling cyber crime and making the UK one of the most secure places in the world to do business in cyberspace. This will be done through key steps such as significantly increasing "the law enforcement agency capability on cyber crime by March 2012," and building "a single reporting system for citizens and small businesses to report cyber crime."
- Making the UK more resilient to cyber attack and better able to protect our interests in cyberspace. "Expand the government advice to include a wider range of organisations whose resilience is a priority for the UK economy," strengthen government ICT networks, and creating significant defence capabilities for both military and citizen through the Ministry of Defence.
- Helping to shape an open, vibrant and stable cyberspace which the UK public can use safely and that supports open societies. The continuation of what was started by the London Conference on Cyberspace to create international standards of conduct within the internet. This objective is surrounding creating partnerships with the likes of the U.S. and Australia, supporting the open internet standard (rather contradictory to the Stop Online Piracy Act), and help strengthen international systems to build confidence in online business.
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Building the UK’s cross-cutting knowledge, skills and capability to underpin all cyber security objectives. Simply put, the government will be improving their abilities to anticipate our trends surrounding to better prepare for the future of the cyberspace: further protecting us and gaining and understanding about potential cyber crimes.
The strategy will exchange "actionable information on cyber threats", "analyse new trends" and work to "strengthen and link up our collective cyber security capabilities". But it does come with a sizeable amount of risks, namely a "government-sponsored venture capital model to unlock innovation on cyber security in SMEs."
This means the project will come under risk assessment between Silicon Roundabout and Whitehall, two different appetites for investing venture capital based on the ratio of risk.
But that aside, it's an good step forward, with ambitious plans and dozens of tasks within the objectives. But will all of these tasks be delivered in these financially trying times?
