ITU - Cybersecurity Gateway

GOVERNMENTS

In an increasingly networked society, safeguarding cyberspace as well as Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems and infrastructure has taken on real urgency. It is essential to instill confidence in online trade, commerce, banking, telemedicine, e-government and a host of other applications for countries' future social and economic development.

Achieving cybersecurity depends on the security practices of each and every networked country, business, and citizen. To guard against the sophisticated skills of cyber criminals, all stakeholders need to strive towards developing a global culture of cybersecurity. This will require not only good policing and legislation but also acute threat awareness and development of tough ICT-based countermeasures.

The Role of Government & the Public Sector

Countries’ overall cybersecurity readiness and governments’ cybersecurity-related policies and procedures are clearly at different stages of development and implementation.

Each nation’s government, with the involvement of its various agencies, must determine the level of cybersecurity risk that it is willing to accept and expose its citizens and businesses to. Ultimately it is the responsibility of each government to ensure that the country is ready and capable of protecting its own citizens and by doing so contribute the building a global culture of cybersecurity.

The strategy that the government employs for information and network security will have impact on the country’s economic and social development, and international competitiveness.

As there are many different actors involved in the various parts of critical information infrastructure protection, on a national level the government needs to clearly distribute roles and related responsibility to ensure that the structure they have built ensures relative cybersecurity on the national level and does not leave any gaps and uncovered areas.

As a first step, cybersecurity needs to be based on national security policy. However, as the conditions for cybersecurity constantly change, the cybersecurity policy process must be flexible and adaptive. In addition, tailored information on security risks and remedies should be innovately shared with small and medium enterprises and individual users.

Education is a key enabler!