Global Cyber Alliance To Tackle The Biggest Risks

The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) has been launched, holding its first strategic advisory committee (SAC) meeting recently at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

The mission of GCA is to identify systemic cyber-risks where significant progress can be made on risk mitigation, and then to bring together the people and resources to identify and implement a solution—to take action—and to measure the effect. The outcome of this effort is not a report with recommendations but actual risk reduction moving forward on a path to eradicate a systemic cyber-risk.

The SAC is chaired by the GCA's three founding partners; the New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., London Police Commissioner Ian Dyson and Chair of the Center for Internet Security, John Gilligan.

GCA will regularly assess the top cyber-risks that the collective community believes are significant threats to the global, online community and for which GCA can have a measurable, positive impact on the eradication of the risk.

To that end, GCA has decided to tackle phishing by driving implementation of two solutions that have been shown to be effective—limiting spoofing of email (through DMARC) and minimizing the effect of phishing and other attacks (through secure DNS practices).

"The Global Cyber Alliance was borne out of a shared commitment to reducing cyber risk worldwide,” Vance said. “By focusing the institutional knowledge and resources of stakeholders on select challenges, GCA will be able to isolate and address key vulnerabilities adversely affecting individuals and organizations all over the world, ultimately benefitting those in both the public and private sectors."

At the Strategic Advisory Committee meeting, the Global Cyber Alliance presented several top systemic risks to consider tackling through task groups focused on implementation: Phishing; risks arising from weak identity and authentication mechanisms; risks arising from vulnerable and compromised websites; and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

"I have firsthand knowledge of the power of the collective effort to make systemic changes to improve our cybersecurity posture,” said Gilligan. “GCA’s mission is to confront these risks on an international scale which is critical in this day and age. The SAC meeting reconfirmed the importance of working together to confront these top risks."

Dyson added, "The Global Cyber Alliance has identified the biggest risks to businesses and individuals globally from cyber crime. By prioritizing the risks that cause the most harm, the alliance can build solutions that can make the cyber-world a safer place in the future."
Infosecurity: http://bit.ly/1pjNwDP