Threats to cyber security are a national problem and training is needed across government and the private sector to combat them.
Research and intelligence company Wolfpack Information Risk will work on five projects this year to address this national issue.
Craig Rosewarne, MD of Wolfpack, speaking at ITWeb Security Summit 2016, at Vodacom World in Midrand yesterday, said there are five national cyber security community initiatives for 2016 that those working in the security sector need to be aware of.
Namely, establishing critical information infrastructure protection (CIIP), a national cyber training and awareness programme, incident response teams, a space for cyber crime collaboration, and a threat intelligence centre.
Rosewarne said the initiatives were brought to light after four concerns were raised in research reports done over the last few years.
The first issue is the skills shortage in SA. He said there is a large skills gap, especially in government, as it is constantly losing good people to industry.
The next concern is awareness: "There are no national awareness campaigns about cyber security being rolled out across the country like there are for health, such as HIV," noted Rosewarne.
The third concern is what is being done around the cyber aspects of critical infrastructure. The last concern is the distrust of the system and belief that reporting cyber crime will not result in any meaningful outcome.
The initiatives are all based around the CIIP. Critical information infrastructures are communications and/or information services whose availability, reliability and resilience are essential to the functioning of a modern economy. The CIIP protects them.
Stemming off the CIIP is the industry cyber incident response teams for all significant private sectors, and the national training and awareness programme for government entities. Around 70 people from government departments and agencies will benefit from the training, and they are expected to go back and train people within their office.
The other two initiatives require both government and private sector opt-in.
Wolfpack hopes to improve the cyber crime task force by offering skills to special task teams from private companies.
The last initiative, the threat intelligence centre, will create an early warning system for cyber threats. It will look at improving threat intelligence-gathering and sharing for the benefit of all South African stakeholders. This will ensure sanitised information-sharing across computer security incident response teams, industry bodies and public/private organisations.
Rosewarne said an estimated $170 billion is spent globally on cyber security annually. SA has the ability to establish itself as a player in this market, he added.
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