As part of last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) the Prime Minister announced that our ability to detect and defend against cyber attacks would be crucial to our national security, so important that it was elevated to a ‘Tier 1’ threat alongside issues such as terrorism and international military crises.

Since then, work to embed the culture of operating in cyberspace across the defence community has been taking place in earnest with the Defence Cyber Security Programme being set up to drive the necessary changes.

Now, under the leadership of Major General Jonathan Shaw, Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Global Issues), work on the programme is moving ahead quickly and the Cyber Security Policy Team was stood up on 1 April 2011 to develop a unified and integrated response to the threat of cyber attack.