Cybersecurity - a New Dimension of National and Social Security

During COVID-19 disruption, there have been different voices about social distancing vs. herd immunity. My answer is “it all depends on which country or community you belong to.”

While battling with coronavirus virus, cyber threats with digital viruses have sneakily crawled around us from all directions in the virtual world.

Cybersecurity is a new dimension of national and social security; and cyber warfare is a new form of global warfare. To avoid the epidemic outbreak of cyber threats from becoming exponential growth like COVID-19, it requires all our attentions at the early stage to take actions in stopping it from growing viral.

Based on my experience as a learning consultant and coach for digital transformation in preparing for the future disruption in any companies, I will like to propose the following project and planning to institutions, companies and countries to take proactive and preventive actions against cyber-attacks as early as we can.

1. Define mission, vision, purpose, objectives, and scope to identify the boundary and requirements of our cybersecurity program.

2. Develop an overall strategy based on the output of step 1.

3. Select the critical scenarios and use cases along with approaches for modelling how to identify, monitor, hunt, track and contain cyber threats like dealing with epidemics.

4. Plan for actions, testing, iterations, and releases for general practices.

5. In parallel with the development of the step 1–4 in place, we should also deploy a supporting system and collect data for continuous operational support, monitoring and improvement.

It is important to coordinate all the cyber security activities across internal and external organizations to clarify roles and responsibilities during the execution for seamless collaboration. With any delay in the early stage, we may be facing cyber pandemic in the near future.

In summary, speed under a big vision of cybersecurity is of the essence. We must move fast and iterate at high velocity by using such as agile and design thinking/research approaches to capture the top threats through prototyping, testing and continuing improvement to protect the future of our communities in cyber security and our country from cyber warfare.