Not a day goes by now, it seems, without news of a fresh, more deadly, cyber attack. Cast your mind back to a decade ago and you may recall that e-crime would crop up in the media only occasionally.
Once an issue such as cyber crime threatens to undermine our lives – cynically you could argue affecting how we vote – the politicos’ ears prick up and take notice. This was the case recently with the publication of a new e-crime report.
The UK’s Home Affairs Committee found that Britain is still complacent about this nature of crime. The report even went as far as suggesting there’s a cyber crime ‘black hole’, with the war being lost in combating its detrimental effect on our businesses and lives.
The committee’s chief, MP Keith Vaz, went as far as saying: “The threat of a cyber attack to the UK is so serious it is marked as a higher level threat than a nuclear attack.”
Mirroring the report’s findings were those of a recent Ponemon Institute study concluding that cyber crime is very costly. The Institute benchmarked 38 organisations and found that the median annual cost of e-crime totalled £2.1m.
The work of our aforementioned elected representatives is key to tackling such new threats – for example cast your mind back to Y2K. Today, it was the Home Affairs Committee alerting us to a major problem. Those with a cabby-like ‘knowledge’ of Westminster will know we should hotfoot it over to the other side of SW1 to a department where future solutions to e-crime lie – education.
In the UK, we have a great opportunity to review and improve how cyber security is taught in our schools as part of the computing curriculum. The geeky, nerdy computer boffin image is now changing. If we can tap into the silicon roundabout cool to inspire tech icons of tomorrow, I’m all for it.
I’d like to image a future where our young people’s role models are tech pioneers, fighting crime, as opposed to the current obsession with footballers. Children look up and listen to their idols, so I’m hoping those in the ever-developing tech world get their deserved time in the spotlight. It’s not churlish to imagine Cyber Security Idol – I really should trademark this – appearing on our screens in the future. Here’s hoping!