PPPs important in cybersecurity fight

THE establishment of a public-private partnership (PPP) is important as we look towards fighting cyber-security threats.

This was highlighted by Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights and Global Threat Alliances at Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs, as he spoke during Fortinet’s recent virtual forum that was hosted in association with the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Smart Technology (MIST).

As we look forward to the future, Manky expressed that persons could expect to have COVID-19 around for a long time and in order to address the issues caused by COVID-19 on cyberspace, it was important to band together and act now.

“We need to work from a point of a public-private relationship. I believe this is critical,” he said.

“We need to work together to make it more expensive to take these cyber-criminals offline, and expose who they are, especially when they are preying on people in bad situations, such as the COVID-19 landscape and when they are trying to take and inadvertently cripple economies for their greed.

“So these are things that we need to address and we can probably only effectively address these when we work together.”

Manky said that even though there was a lot of work to be done in improving cybersecurity, good progress has been made so far. However, it was noted that it was important to understand threats, such as the world of 5G and operational technology, as these were landscape threats that showed no signs of slowing down.

It is against this backdrop that Manky strongly advocated for the devel-opment of PPPs, in order to come up with security solutions.

Senator Kay McConney, Minister of Innovation, Science and Smart Technology, acknowledged that Barbados would actively seek to foster regional and global corporations with partners in order to build its capacity and keep up to date with threats in the cyberspace, as well as come up with solutions to these problems.

“Our Government has recognised early on the need to have public and private partnerships and we have therefore formed a cybersecurity working group of experts from both the public and private sector that would provide policy recommendations and advice and general support as required,” she said.

“We know that we have to evolve this working group into a more robust structure and this structure will further help us to shape our cybersecurity governance posture as well as the institutional framework as it relates to standards and compliance within the sector.”