What to do when your partner in a fight disappears: What was evident at the conference was the reliability of Ukraine’s European partners and the very evident and self-declared step back taken by the United States. Indeed, it was repeatedly stated by the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence) that Signal had inexplicably stopped working with the Ukrainian government in addressing the Russian social engineering and manipulation of Signal users, much to the chagrin of the Ukrainian teams attempting to counter Russia’s actions.And here’s where the necessity of flexibility as a core support for resilience was evident: The panel discussion stressed the importance of having options and alternatives when political dynamics change reality on the ground.Satellite imagery or communications, for example, might be available one day, gone the next. The harsh reality is that commercial entities (and governments) may change their level of cooperation and provision of goods and services with the political wind. Volodymyr Karastelyov, acting head of the SBU Cyber Security Department, noted that one of Ukraine’s major realizations has been that it needs to find alternatives to commercially provided systems.The key takeaway from this discussion was that when your partner stops being your partner, as in the case of Ukraine, it serves to help the aggressor.In addition, the Second Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention was crafted to address the challenges of transnational cybercrime, be it by a criminal or state entity. The protocol, signed by 78 countries, is a light at the end of the tunnel. It is designed to speed up the prosecution pipeline, as it currently stands, cybercrime may take three minutes to conduct and years to prosecute, which is not much of a deterrent.
Resilience is critically important to cybersecurity: Resilience is more than just a word; it is a way of thinking. The adage, don’t put all your eggs in one basket holds true today for cybersecurity as it did for the child on the farm walking with their eggs back to the kitchen from the coop.Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at WithSecure shared during a remote address to the forum how Europe has the resources to address the cyberthreats in its work with Ukraine and “need not look to a far-off land” for cybersecurity solutions. And therein is the crux of the takeaway for CISOs: resources may exist where you least expect them and are figuratively speaking in the backyard in the case of Ukraine.Conversely, a service may disappear at any time, and resilience requires that an alternative capability be available. I have shared previously how in my younger days, I was engaged in telecommunications and always had multiple levels of communication available to me and my customers, with the final level being Morse Code transmissions.Planning for one’s worst-case scenarios (service provider failure, catastrophic event, an insider threat becoming reality, etc.) and then never having to use that plan is not a defeatist mentality; it is a prudent one, as evidenced by the Ukrainian resilience over the course of the past decade.
First seen on csoonline.com
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