Public sector security: a critical national emergency?
10th September 2024 • Online
How can critical national services be brought into line with private sector best practice?
“‘It could be taken down by an enthusiastic child’: Whitehall wide open to cyber”
A former civil servant turned whistleblower who used to work on cybersecurity while in Whitehall told the TaxPayers’ Alliance: “The ongoing use of legacy systems in government is a disgrace and completely inexcusable. We move at such a slow pace that it seems only to get worse."
"In secure bits of the private sector like banks, heads would roll until all legacy systems were patched or replaced …"
“The problem is so bad that some of these systems could be taken down by an enthusiastic child – the vulnerabilities are publicly known, and pre-made malware is readily available. It keeps me awake at night worrying that at any moment, a key HMRC system or a hospital might get taken down because we have not got the most basic protections in place."
This is a pretty dramatic description of the challenge the public sector faces in securing what are, after all, in many cases, systems providing critical services to our society, let alone those that protect our personal safety, our borders and our democracy. The recent situation with China is just one reminder.
Public sector organisations store and process vast amounts of sensitive data, from addresses, to tax and other payment details to our legal and health records. They also exchange this data across systems that are already creaking with the demands placed upon them.
How will these systems – and the people that run them – cope with the pressures of rapid, new digitalisation? The British Library, the Electoral Commission, NHS and our universities have already been hit hard.
Even foundational cyber-hygiene is hugely problematic in such complex environments. And if moving to Cloud environments is seen as a way around legacy issues, then how can the public sector solve the challenge of visibility across such a large estate as well as avoid the problems of misconfiguration that have dogged far smaller organisations?
Perhaps most important of all, how can these entities achieve their objectives on limited budgets in the full glare of the transparency that the public demands?
What does best practice look like in securing the public sector? How can vendors help?
Securing the Public Sector will look at how security should evolve from both a technology and a human perspective. Join our real-life case studies and in-depth technical sessions from the security and privacy teams at some of the country’s leading public sector organisations.
This event is for anyone in:
- Local and national government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Public safety and defence organisations
- Public transportation
- The civil service