Governments increasingly assume they’ll use offensive cyber tools as part of state power
Governments increasingly assume they’ll use offensive cyber tools as part of state power
Publish Date: 2026-05-22 12:58:00
Source Domain: federalnewsnetwork.com
Terry Gerton We talk a lot about cyber on this show. We have a lot of folks who are deeply engaged in doing cyber every day. And I think it’s easy, certainly it is for me, to slip into thinking about cyber as a technical problem. NCC Group has just released its fifth edition of the Global Cyber Policy Radar, and I think it tries to make a case that this is not just a technical problem. Tell us how you all approach the cyber security space.
Kat Sommer It’s a really good point because, yes, you’re right, traditionally. We look at cyber, or people have looked at cyber, as a technical issue. What we’re trying to work out in the Global Cyber Policy Radar is the way in which that conversation has shifted. And it’s shifted in two ways in our view. One is cyber has very much become an instrument of geopolitics. And we talk about the geopoliticalization of cyber. And the other way in which we talk about it is that cyber has moved from the IT back room into the board agenda now, because of the way in which governments around the world, regulatory authorities around the world are now holding boards and senior executives responsible for cyber security and cyber resilience outcomes.
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Terry Gerton Let’s take those in each in their own conversation, this idea that cyber is now a tool of international diplomacy. What does that mean in terms of offensive and defensive strategies and how are you seeing governments move?
Kat Sommer I think the context for a lot of that is that we live in a very digital world nowadays, so the foundations of our economies, the foundations of societies are basically driven by digital technologies now, which means the cyber security and cyber resilience of those technologies underpinning everything that we do has become more easily disruptible. The way in which governments used to think about cybersecurity, cyber resilience was from a preventative point of view. So if you look at a lot of regulations that we’ve seen published…
