Director of Operations states what keeps him awake at night.
Ransomware is the cause of most sleepless nights, according to the NCSC’s operations director.
Speaking at the SANS Cyber Threat conference in London, Paul Chichester, director of operations at the NCSC, said “a lot of time can be spent talking about nation states” but day in and day out, from an NCSC and a national point of view, it is “cyber criminality, it is ransomware, and it is extortion that is causing the most harm minute by minute.”
Chichester also said that the adaptive tradecraft of threat groups in the ransomware ecosystem “is certainly something that's going to keep me sort of awake in terms of ‘I know the bad things are happening’ and ‘I know that whilst we're sleeping companies and businesses for being targeted’ and they might go out of business.”
He said there is a visceral feeling in the role the NCSC performs, especially as it assists victims. Chichester said he sees the physical and mental impact that has on individuals and their resilience “is really profound.”
He also claimed that seeing the impact of ransomware everyday drives the need to respond and take action.
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
