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Budget for cyber

by Mark Rowe

The autumn 2018 Budget included £1 billion to the Ministry of Defence, to cover among other things, cyber for the remainder of this year and next. The Chancellor Philip Hammond also promised £160m more of counter-terrorism police funding in 2019-20, ‘to protect CT police numbers … and to allow future CT police funding to be considered in the round at the Spending Review. I recognise that policing more generally is under pressure from the changing nature of crime.’

Comments

Paul Farrington, Director EMEA and APAC at software security firm CA Veracode, said: “It’s encouraging to see how highly the UK Government views cyber security as being critical to its national defence strategy. Foreign state-backed and other malicious cyber actors are finding more sophisticated ways to gain access to sensitive data and use it for dangerous means. Application security is a $3 billion market and climbing because application software is vulnerable to attack and are one of the top weaknesses hackers look to exploit.

“Although better than other European nations such as Switerland and Germany, UK organisations need to fix software flaws bugs much faster. From our State of Software Security Report (SoSS), on average UK organisations are spending 10 months to fix 75pc of its flaws. As public and private sector organisations become more dependent on web apps, not patching or fixing bugs quickly creates a greater attack surface as we saw with North Korea and WannaCry. In addition, developers are using open source components for a majority of their code, gaining speed but increasing risk if vulnerabilities are not accounted for. If the UK Government is serious about reducing cyber risk, this must include a focus on software security.”

At the defence and security trade body ADS, Chief Executive Paul Everitt praised what he called positive steps to help industry maintain investment, support future productivity improvements and work with the Ministry of Defence to boost the UK’s national security.

“We welcome the new £1.1bn investment announced for the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. We hope some of this extra investment will support ground breaking research into high value design and urban air mobility. Measures announced on investment allowances, business rate relief and apprenticeships are an encouraging down-payment on steps that will be needed to support smaller companies through the cashflow crisis that could follow a chaotic Brexit.

“The threat of leaving the EU with no deal is a drag on our economy and the Treasury should stand ready to take further steps if needed to make sure small companies are able to sustain their businesses through any period of turbulence.”

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