Cyber security: How do the government protect cyberspace?

 Sadly the Government see the threat of cyber attacks both to the private sector and public to be very real and compromising to many businesses all over the UK. In 2014 the Information Security Breaches Survey found that an enormous 81% of big companies had disclosed information regarding some form of security breach within their cyber data (Johnson, 2013). Costing each organisation a mean total of between £600,000 and £1.5m. The findings are also supported by frequent stories regarding large scale cyber attacks. The Director of the GCHQ "In GCHQ we continue to see real threats to the UK on a daily basis, and I'm afraid the scale and rate of these attacks shows little sign of abating". This of course makes us aware of the attacks that are a real threat  to our cyber privacy but potentially our national security and business owners. However, what does our country provide to ensure that cyber attacks become less frequent and are more difficult to execute. Cyber attacks are expected to cause more damage in the future, according to the Royal United Service Institute (RUSI), their survey suggested that businesses are taking responsibility for their own safety and not waiting for the government to rescue them. This could be because they believe the government will not help them or are incapable and therefore take it into their own hands, or they feel happy with the education of cyber security given in the annual strategies (French. 2014). More than half of CEOs (57%) hold themselves accountable for major cyber security incidents, whereas 88% of these businesses have dramatically increased their annual cyber security spending following breaches to their systems (Nicolson, 2012) . Responding to this survey a Cabinet Office spokesperson said the government published its Cyber Security Strategy in 2011 and has invested £860m to 2016 on what they are calling the National Cyber security programme to ensure that Britain continues in its efforts to become more safe in doing business online and preventing breaches of this type becoming even more frequent.



Reference List-



Epiphaniou, G., French, T. and Maple, C. (2014). The DarkWeb: Cyber-Security Intelligence Gathering Opportunities, Risks and Rewards. Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 22(LISS 2013), p.21.



Johnson, M. (2013). Cyber Crime, Security and Digital Intelligence. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.


Nicholson, A., Webber, S., Dyer, S., Patel, T. and Janicke, H. (2012). SCADA security in the light of Cyber-Warfare. Computers & Security, 31(4), pp.418-436.