Ciaran Martin announced as Technical Committee Chair
London – 18 January 2024 – The newly launched Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) today announced the appointment of its Technical Committee to be chaired by Ciaran Martin.
A not-for-profit organisation launched on 1.1.24, the CMC represents a milestone in the UK’s approach to tackling cyber events by categorising them on a scale of one to five based on how widespread they are and their financial impact to UK organisations. This will bring greater clarity and transparency to these complex incidents and enable UK organisations to better prepare for, and respond to, these events.
The CMC will work with partner organisations to gather relevant data about cyber events which will then be reviewed by its Technical Committee to determine their categorisation.
The Technical Committee will be chaired by Ciaran Martin, who previously set up and led the UK’s world-leading National Cyber Security Centre and is a leading advisor to a number of governments on cyber security. He is joined by other UK leading cyber experts including: Sadie Creese, Professor of Cyber Security at the University of Oxford and previously of QinetiQ and the Ministry of Defence, Dan Jeffery Managing Director at Daintta and previously Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for NHS Blood and Transplant and lead for the NHS’s National Cyber Programme, Jamie MacColl, Research Fellow in cyber security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and Julian Williams, Head of the Department of Finance at Durham University, and formerly Director of the Durham University Institute of Hazard Risk and Resilience.
“I am excited to be involved in the Cyber Monitoring Centre. It addresses a key challenge in UK cyber risk response, namely trying to quantify the impact of systemic cyber events as they are occurring,” said Martin. “This whole area of measuring the severity of incidents has proved a really tricky one but if we can crack it we can hugely improve the way we deal with cyber security.”
CEO of the CMC, Will Mayes, added: “Entirely independent of any one company, organisation or sector and made of individuals with extensive and different experiences, our Technical Committee is a vital component to ensure a trusted event categorisation. I am delighted that we have attracted such high calibre individuals to this innovative and valuable initiative and am confident that our committee will become viewed as a reliable, expert assessor of systemic cyber events.”
The CMC will be in an incubation and development phase in 2024. During this period, event categorisation will not be made public and the CMC and Technical Committee will learn from events to improve the categorisation methodology. Event categorisation will start being released publicly in 2025.
Technical Committee Member bios can be found here.