Britain’s businesses have been invited to sign a Cyber Resilience Pledge, confirming that the national response to artificial intelligence has reached the reassuring stage of asking everyone to read three bullet points and involve the board.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology says the pledge will launch later this year, as organisations face increasingly fast moving threats enabled by artificial intelligence. Its remedies are admirably concrete: make cyber security a board level responsibility, join the National Cyber Security Centre’s free Early Warning Service and require Cyber Essentials certification across supply chains.
There is also £90 million to improve cyber resilience across the economy, alongside the continuing passage of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. The announcement says the UK cyber security sector grew by 11 per cent to £14.7 billion last year, while the number of firms rose by 20 per cent to 2,603. Cyber security is therefore both an urgent national necessity and a thriving industry, which is convenient because somebody has to sell all those locks to the people who keep leaving the door open.
The pledge’s central innovation is to make responsibility a board level matter. The people who once asked an IT department whether the Wi Fi was having a mood can now receive a formal briefing about hostile actors, supply chain vulnerabilities and the importance of not clicking suspicious links.
In the fictional boardroom, the router has been promoted to observer. It listens patiently while executives discuss resilience, then requests that the minutes record its objection to being blamed for every incident since 2014. The chair agrees to review the matter after the next strategy meeting, provided nobody forwards the attachment.
The practical steps are sensible. Clear ownership, early warnings and basic security standards are more useful than a glossy promise to be vigilant. The comedy lies in the familiar institutional ritual of discovering that an obvious precaution becomes a landmark initiative once it acquires a pledge, a ministerial announcement and a progress dashboard.
By the end of the meeting, every director has signed, the supply chain has been instructed to certify itself and the router has received its tiny padlock. It is now waiting for the government to announce a second pledge requiring companies to remember where they put the first one.
Source: GOV.UK.
