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CIVIL CONTINGENCIES | 57
Director GCHQ outlines the UK’s response to the cyber challenge
On 12 October, Iain Lobban, Director GCHQ, set out GCHQ’s broad perspective on cyber security. Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he outlined how cyber is not just a national security or defence issue but is something that goes to the heart of our economic well-being in cyberspace in order to present the public with greater awareness of the challenge. He also talked through the Government’s response and planned developments in order to secure UK advantage in security, military and commercial spheres.
GCHQ is probably best known for its foreign intelligence mission, providing Signals Intelligence or ‘Sigint’. Its current contributions support a wide range of national security activity including: support to the military in Afghanistan and more broadly; counter-terrorism, supporting Security Service investigations and working with the Secret Intelligence Service to understand the upstream threat; counter-proliferation; tackling serious and organised crime; and a range of other global security issues.
But it is perhaps not so widely known that GCHQ also has a clear security mission. The precise description is ‘to provide advice and assistance about... cryptography and other matters relating to the protection of information and other material’. Within Government we describe that more simply as the ‘Information Assurance’ mission.
Both of these missions have a proud history – you’re all aware of course of the origins of GCHQ in Bletchley Park’s successes in code breaking and code making and the remarkable technology and people that delivered them. Through the intervening years our achievements have remained at that high level of technological expertise. Our people, of whom I am immensely proud, remain one of this country’s great unsung assets.
Communications technology Our mastery of high-end communications technology is hugely relevant to the problems of cyber security. You may have noticed that although we still keep very quiet about our operational successes there has been a bit more by way of on- the-record comment from GCHQ recently. I think that’s important. One significant change that’s taken place in international communications is that
in the modern world the same technology that our adversaries use is used by citizens going about their daily business. So reassuring people that they are being appropriately defended against threats without encroachments on their privacy is very important. I also want to bang the drum publicly about the importance of technology and cyber skills so that we can sustain a flow of top-quality recruits into GCHQ and its industry partners. My perspective on cyber comes from bringing together both sides of GCHQ’s mission: • The intelligence mission illuminates some of the capabilities – and sometimes the intentions of adversaries to use cyber techniques. It allows us to detect some of their activities.
• And the information assurance mission gives us knowledge of where our own government and critical national infrastructure systems, and those of our Allies, may be vulnerable to cyber exploitation.
Emergency Services Times November 2010
iStockphoto.com
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