`Insert Cyber Here’: Are National Cybersecurity Initiatives Effective?

Taylor Roberts

19Feb
14:00 19th February 2016 ( week 6, Hilary Term 2016 )
Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building

Cybersecurity capacity-building has become a major objective of both national strategic planning and technological innovation. National cybersecurity strategies, cybercrime legislation, cybersecurity standards, and awareness raising campaigns all seek to enhance the resilience of the nation against advancing cyber threats. While these policy initiatives all seek to achieve a similar goal, it is difficult to identify the actual impact these initiatives have on the cyber resilience of a country. How does a nation know that its policy efforts are working? At this point, there has been no effort to assess potential relationships between more qualitative cyber capacity instruments, and more quantitative indicators for cyber resilience used by cybersecurity practitioners. This research is profoundly needed as an increasing number of countries seek to build cybersecurity capacity through a variety of means. Assessing relationships between policy and resilience data has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness of policy implementation and re-evaluate potentially inflated risk metrics produced by cybersecurity practitioners. Ultimately, effective cybersecurity policy would enable cybersecurity practitioners to enhance national resilience while also facilitating practitioners to impact strategic decision making.

Speaker bio

Taylor Roberts is a James Martin Research Fellow at the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre, focusing on researching and developing maturity metrics for measuring cyber policy and cyber defence. Taylor has also served as research lead when applying the cybersecurity maturity model in several in-country consultations across the world. Previously, Taylor studied Chinese politics and cybersecurity at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. During this time, he also interned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, where he observed trends in the incorporation of cyber within the government and military policies of several countries. As a researcher for UCSD’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Taylor co- authored a chapter on the online underground economy within China for inclusion in the book titled China and Cybersecurity - Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain (OUP). He also analysed trends in, and determined the potential threat posed by, cyber-attacks attributed to China.