2012 Work Programme & Forthcoming Meetings

The current work programme is focussed on identifying areas for practical co-operation and bringing together teams that will demonstrate the success of industry led partnership. The teams currently operational or planned include:

Awareness: the aim is to cross-fertilise consumer oriented campaigns (e.g. Get Safe Online, Bank Safe Online, Race Online etc) with staff and customer information security education programmes and to link both to the marketing plans of those who want more of their current and potential customers to transact with them online, confidently and securely. This subgroup is chaired by Martin Smith (The Security Company). It aims to bring together the Information Security Awareness Forum, the Security Awareness Special Interest Group, the National Fraud Authority, UK Payments and those running most of the main current campaigns.

Skills: the aim is to improve the provision and take-up of modular training (at all levels from first entry and end-user to professional updating), when, where and how needed, to enable employers to fill skills gaps, including by retraining existing staff. The strategy is to bring together professional bodies (BCS, CREST, ISACA, ISC2, IISP, ISSA etc.), sector skills councils (e-Skills, Skills4Justice and Financial Services) as well as users, suppliers, training providers and law enforcement and security agencies, using the creation of the security stream of the National Academy for IT as a catalyst. (this team is joint with Workforce Skills).

Small Firms: the aim is to bring together currently fragmented exercises to educate, accredit and support small firms as potential victims and as points of vulnerability in the supply chains of large organisation firms and consumers, so that they can better manage the risks to their business (including impersonation, fraud, charge backs etc.) at affordable cost. The strategy is to bring together those running local and regional initiatives, major organisations with large numbers of small firms in their supply chains, those seeking to support or sell to small firms and those working on national exercises, such as the Fighting Fraud Together team.  

Youth Engagement: the aim is to build on, replicate, support and spread current best practice in security awareness and online behaviour programmes, delivered via schools and youth groups, by drawing in additional resource, particularly university students and young mentors from industry. The subgroup is chaired by Anu Khurmi of IBM. The main current activity is support for YPNGlobal which has already delivered workshops for over 1,500 children, in co-operation with Childnet, CEOP, City of London Police, NPIA and a growing number of major employers, who use it as part of both their Corporate Social Responsibility and their Professional Development programmes.  

Online Impersonation, including Brand, Domain Name and Internet Address: to look at the issues from the view of the victims, beginning with co-operation to repair reputational damage and the use of existing legal frameworks to obtain redress (joint with Information Governance and Communications). The intention is to work in close co-operation with those working on Objective 21 of the Fighting Fraud Together Action Plan.

Security Procurement: to publicise and encourage good practice in the procurement of security products and services (including consultancy) and inclusion of security by design/default in mainstream planning and procurement (joint with Public Service Delivery and Information Governance).  The first target deliverable is guidance for the procurement and use of “trusted computing” products and services for systems which handle sensitive information which may be exchanged between organisations or transmitted over public networks.

Forthcoming Meetings