CISP and Fusion Cell will monitor and detect to prevent future attacks.

With no boundaries or geography, the World Wide Web has brought together people and businesses from all over the globe and afforded them limitless opportunities to enterprise and socialise. Besides the benefits and convenience of the internet, in recent years cyber-attacks have reached industrial scale. Daily, businesses of all sizes become victims of cybercrime, as a result industrial espionage and intellectual property theft and losses are costing the UK economy billions of pounds annually.

For years many companies suffered in silence, reluctant to revel publicly when they have been attacked for fear it might damage their reputation and share prices if investors and customers realised they might have lost valuable intellectual property.

But a new initiative to improve communications between businesses and the government on cyber threats known as the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP) was announced yesterday. CISP will include a secure web portal based on a social networking structure that enables members to choose who they want to share information with in real time. It will contain programmes aimed at building cross-sector trust to underpin information sharing. Plus see experts from GCHQ, MI5, the police, businesses and security analysts’ work alongside each other to improve their understanding of cyber risks facing the UK.

GCHQ will run a hub centre, where businesses can feel secure to share information on threats between themselves and the public sector. And a cyber-attack monitoring operations room, known as a Fusion Cell, will operate from a secret location to monitor live cyber-attacks in real time.

After years of not being able or willing to share assaults information, UK businesses can now feel secure the information they share with government and each other is safely used to protect them and prevent future incidents.