Over the past five years, the UK government has spent £1 billion in a bid to help the country’s overall levels of cyber-security. However, according to the Director of Cyber Security and Resilience at CESG, Alex Dewedney, the measures have proven to be rather ineffective. ‘I think the best way to sum up the challenge we face is that, while we’ve done a lot over the past five years and spent quite a lot of money as a government, particularly in those years of austerity we’ve been through, the bottom line is it hasn’t worked,’ he said.

CESG is part of GCHQ – the people who advise organisations on how to defend against threats. The GCHQ is apparently concentrating on improving communication and making sure businesses are informed about the latest threats. Instead, Dewedney argues, the government needs to spend money on fixing legacy IT issues which stand as gaping holes ready to be exploited. He feels that these are the basic measures that are being ignored, and that they need to be sorted out before moving on to more sophisticated defensive measures.

It is thought that reported security breaches are the tip of the iceberg, with the major issues going unreported. That is, of course because the affected business fears the damage that will be done to its reputation.

World of Tech  8th March 2016