\n<\/p>\n
Companies need to do more to mitigate the potential effects of cyber-attacks, the head of GCHQ has said, including making physical, paper copies of crisis plans to use if an attack brings down entire computer systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are your contingency plans? Because attacks will get through,\u201d said Anne Keast-Butler, who has headed GCHQ, the British government\u2019s cyber and signals intelligence agency, since 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happens when that happens to you in a company, have you really tested that?\u201d said Keast-Butler, speaking on Wednesday at a London conference organised by the cybersecurity company Recorded Future. \u201cYour plans \u2026 have you got them on paper somewhere in case all your systems really go down? How will you communicate with each other if you\u2019re completely reliant on a system that actually you shut down?\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, the National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, announced figures showing that \u201chighly significant\u201d cyber-attacks have risen by 50% in the past year. Security and intelligence agencies are now dealing with a new attack several times per week, the figures showed.<\/p>\n
Keast-Butler said the government and business needed to work together to tackle future attacks and improve defensive systems, as modern technology and artificial intelligence make the threats more diffuse and reduce \u201cthe entry level capability\u201d that malicious actors need to do damage. She said work with internet service providers to block malicious websites at source was \u201cblocking millions of potential hits\u201d but said major companies needed to do much more to protect themselves.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, a report by the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) said the hack of Jaguar Land Rover had cost the UK economy an estimated \u00a31.9bn, which could make it the most costly cyber-attack in British history.<\/p>\n
JLR had to shut down systems across all its factories and offices after the attack in August, and may not be able to return to normal production capacity until January.<\/p>\n
Keast-Butler said \u201c[there are] far, far, far more attacks that get stopped than the ones that we\u2019re focusing in on\u201d, but added that the increased publicity around the JLR and several other major cyber-attacks provided a good moment to ram home the importance of cybersecurity protocols.<\/p>\n
She said she spoke regularly to CEOs of major companies and one of her messages to them was that they need to put people who understand cybersecurity on their boards. \u201cQuite often, the way boards are configured, they don\u2019t have people who will know the right questions to be asking. So the interest is there, but the right questions don\u2019t get asked,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, the Co-op Group suffered a cyber-attack that cost it up to \u00a3120m in lost profits and compromised the personal data of some of its members. Shirine Khoury-Haq, the group\u2019s CEO, released an open letter in the aftermath detailing the importance of cybersecurity drills to build strategy on how to deal with an attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe intensity, urgency and unpredictability of a live attack is unlike anything you can rehearse. That said, those drills are invaluable; they build muscle memory, sharpen instincts, and expose vulnerabilities in your systems,\u201d wrote Khoury-Haq.<\/p>\n
Keast-Butler encouraged companies to share information on attacks with government agencies, saying that \u201csafe spaces\u201d had been set up to enable them to do so without the risk of giving away commercially sensitive information to competitors.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think sometimes people are a bit too reticent to come forward because there\u2019s a sort of personal thing on them or their company as a whole. And that doesn\u2019t help any of us, because then they\u2019re not making the kind of long-term strategic systems changes that we can help out with,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Companies need to do more to mitigate the potential effects of cyber-attacks, the head of GCHQ has said, including making physical, paper copies of crisis plans to use if an attack brings down entire computer systems. \u201cWhat are your contingency plans? Because attacks will get through,\u201d said Anne Keast-Butler, who has headed GCHQ, the British<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[1839,477,1151,2171,17777,3213],"class_list":{"0":"post-30228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-attacks","9":"tag-companies","10":"tag-cybercrime","11":"tag-fight","12":"tag-gchq","13":"tag-urges"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}