The Director of GCHQ speaks at CyberUK 2022

Sir Jeremy Fleming was speaking at CyberUK, the UK’s flagship cyber security conference this week.

The full presentation is here but I’ve picked out some key highlights.

“Of course, we can count ourselves lucky compared to those caught up in wars, but we are also seeing a heightened cyber risk. Cyber criminals are consistently evolving their tactics; the lines are blurring with hostile state activity and ransomware remains a real threat.”

“Cyber clearly matters to everyone.”

“At the global level, the UK has developed as a cyber power. Alongside the more traditional forms of diplomacy and statecraft, cyber now plays a vital role in our national security and prosperity.”

Leadership

CYBER CYBER CYBER – What cyber means for the…

I’m sitting here drinking a cup of tea and thought I’d jot down some of the things I tend to think about. I figured this might help people consider aspects of “cyber” that they might not have considered before.

Education

Stop rushing for “the solution”!

Before you start solutioning

Everyone these days seems to rush towards “the solution”, well as someone who now has few years under their belt, I’d advise people slow down a little and think about their business requirements, outcomes, current state, and constraints. Significantly as well think about how a service will run over a period, not just how to buy it and “fling it into production”.

Threat Intel

OPSEC is Hard: Are you even trying?

OPSEC is hard! Doing things that are covert is expensive and time consuming. Being invisible in today’s digital age is very hard. Operating covertly in plain sight it also hard.

Everything about this “stuff” is hard, except sometimes maybe it’s just viewed as “it’s hard and expensive” so why even bother, or conversely… maybe the objective can be “we want people to know it was us.”

Either way there’s some interesting reading if we look at “cyber” and “opsec”. For the minute I’ve just started to collect a list of links to articles which show some of the ways opsec failures have occurred in the past in relation to the GRU.

Leadership

Security Myths and Bad Advice

It must be good, someone posted about it on LinkedIn!

Ok this isn’t my normal jam, normally I’d just write something that’s hopefully good advice/practise and that would be that. But today let’s try something different!

This was inspired by a twitter convo which evolved into this: https://twitter.com/UK_Daniel_Card/status/1522138771789123584?s=20&t=dL9OkicTY2Orj5hfBtDvVQ

So… what are some cyber security myths that ended up being good practise or “good advice”? Well here’s what I came up with, supported by some awesome cyber community people!

Education

Real World Consumer Cyber Security

Cyber in the Consumer World

My focus normally is on business to business (B2B) environments and “Enterprise” computing and cyber security. However, I’ve been known to venture into the consumer world from time to time. I wondered whether people would be interested in exploring with me what cyber security in the consumer world look like?

Last week I set on an adventure to see what “hacking” myself might look like. I’m thinking that there might be more to this than a fleeting glance at Instagram hacking and a bit of fun on twitter with alts. Maybe we need to look at consumer security and how/if we have got a good user experience in this space?