“if you are not on CISP, why not, get on CISP and encourage people to get on it.”
Speaking at the Cyber Security Summit in London, CERT-UK head Chris Gibson admitted that he sometimes lays awake worrying about the impact of a national incident, but working with academia and industry means that the worrying time is reduced as it can assist companies when they need help.
He said: “We are focused on building awareness and managing incidents so we can kill them before they become a national incident. It is about building awareness so people can understand that the world that they are living in is in cyber space, and when putting networks and systems up, be aware that you will be attacked and you need to do this properly.”
Gibson said that this is powered by the CISP (Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership) where businesses and CERT-UK can talk to each other, but the huge power is in businesses talking to businesses and helping businesses defend against threats.
“It is about getting all those things in one place and locking them all into view so we can see what is going on,” he said. “One thing we work with is CISP so get on CISP, it is free and it is where we put all of our effort into.”
Refering to the Shellshock vulnerability advisory, Gibson said that it used CISP to almost crowd-source information as it could put information into CISP, and partners can add value to that.
“So instead of us trying to do all of the research ourself and put out our line, we can use the information from our partners who are part of that information sharing to built a common and consistent picture so that we can put up a single piece of advice on the CISP so that SMEs don’t need to spend time researching and evaluating the threat and whether the patch works.”
Gibson said that CERT-UK is about the cost to the UK and intelligence of something that is about to happen, and Shellshock “teetered on the edge” of being a major issue, but it did not raise it to the national level as it used partnerships and CISP data to see if it is being exploited.
He said that CISP, a jive based social networking platform with 2FA and high security specifications on the data. Originally it was aimed at the critical national infrastructure, but he got comments from annoyed people who were told they “were not really the market, well you are now.”
Gibson said that of the 700+ members of CISP, a recent addition was a primary school. “Anyone who has a network infrastructure in the UK and wants to learn more from other people who want to learn how to defend that better, and help other people defend it better, or understand the context of the world we live in,” he said.
“We have an ambition and aspiraton to really big this up. The difference now is how fast do you see it and how fast do you respond?”
