Cyber attacks are said to cost UK businesses £18billion in lost revenue and £16billion in increased IT spending per year as a result of breaches. This causes reputation and brand damage due to customer data loss and lost revenue due to down time. According to the Information Security Breaches Survey, put together by the Centre of Economics and business research for Veracode, 81% of large and 60% of small businesses in the UK suffered a cybersecurity breach in 2014.
Looking to address similar issues, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) held its Security Week from 22 to 26 June, with a Security Workshop followed by three thematic sessions. The sessions focused on M2M communications and the IoT, security assurance in Intelligent Transport Systems and Electronic identification and trust services.The event brought together ICT security experts from various stakeholders and security experts from industry, government, regulators and academia.
Delegates to the event were reminded that the threat landscape is now very dynamic, challenging and always evolving, and that education of all relevant parties, including developers, on security standards, is important.
"The industry increasingly depends on broad and global standards and platforms. Hence, the industry has a vested interest in creating standards. Close collaboration with industry leaders in certain technical fields is a must." Marc Henauer, head of OIC MELANI, said at the event "On a national and international level, standardisation and regulation authorities will have to coordinate with their respective sectors to consolidate a common position."
To address security issues on a global scale ETSI established its CYBER technical committee on cybersecurity issues. As well as developing standards for cybersecurity, it coordinates work in other ETSI committees and pays specific attention to European requirements from policies such as the Digital Single Market.
It has already published a technical report on Critical Security Controls for Effective Cyber Defence and will publish later this year a Technical Report on Security Assurance by Default. Following the outcome of the workshop, the committee also started work on a practical introductory guide to privacy.
Two ETSI White Papers have been published to coincide with the Security Week. Security for ICT - The Work of ETSI, provides an overview of all ETSI standardisation topics related to Security. Quantum Safe Cryptography and Security discusses how future development of quantum computing poses risks to current encryption techniques, and the security of today's data, where today's encryption algorithms may not provide sufficient protection against quantum computing.
Author
Tom Austin-Morgan
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk