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The responsibility of protecting the sovereignty of a nation, its borders and people traditionally resides with the military, security agencies, and law enforcement. But in cyber space, there are no countries, no borders, no police, and no militaries. 

Threat actors anonymously carry out attacks at their will, stealing sensitive information, deploying ransomware on critical infrastructures, and conduct denial-of-service attacks to disrupt services, inflicting damages to the economy and causing wide-spread panic in society.

Government agencies, as capable as they are, cannot defend against and mitigate these threats alone. It must be a coordinated effort between governments, corporations, NGOs, sharing information and intelligence. There must also be a change in people’s mindset on cybersecurity, from the end user to IT administrators, to the managers, to minimize the risks of the human factor.

Recent cyber attacks in the United States have shown that it is possible to track down and disrupt cyber threat actors. The speaker will discuss the collaboration between the government and private sector resulted in the indictments individuals who were members of an APT as well as how ransom paid in a ransomware was seized.