Plans to better prepare the UK’s cyber defences have been met with conflicting opinions.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced plans to recruit “reservists” to work alongside regular forces in the creation of the new Joint Cyber Reserve Unit, who will also have the ability to make offensive strikes.
Speaking to IT Security Guru, Dave Anderson, senior director at Voltage Security, said that he saw the positive side of this as it would attract new blood into the security sector as people seek experience. “You can look at what they can bring into the process, so I think this is a good thing,” he said.
“One of the real values will be an overlap into the public sector, as there will be a lot more togetherness between IT and security and groups who can work together, as not is it not perfect so you end up with a stalemate between these groups. With this you can get a different perspective on what is the right level of security and privacy.”
However Robert Hansen, technical evangelist of WhiteHat Security saw the challenge of this, saying that the talent will not scale, as even with a few hundred volunteers, they can only test a few hundred sites a month.
He said: “That wouldn’t count things like setting up defences, helping to architect better security, or triaging hack events. Typical governments have many tens or even hundreds of thousands of websites across all of their sub-entities. It simply doesn’t scale well, and thus far no government that I am aware of that has been under any meaningful attack has been able to defend themselves from breech.”
Anderson acknowledged that it will be a challenge for skilled and unskilled specialists to work together, but said it would be a great opportunity for those involved and it will help the security of nation states and enterprises. He said: “If nothing else, I expect a difference of opinion on this.”
