David Ferbrache OBE on Cyber Resilience, Geopolitics, and AI

CYBEREASON DIMENSIONS LONDON CONFERENCE
Yvette Essen, Head of Communications and Market Engagement
David Ferbrache, Managing Director, Beyond Blue
Keynote Speaker

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[Music]

YVETTE ESSEN:
I'm Yvette Essen, head of communications and market engagement for Cybereason. And I am joined by the keynote speaker at our Dimensions London conference, David Ferbrache. So, I'm delighted for you to join us today.

DAVID FERBRACHE:
Absolute pleasure.

YVETTE ESSEN:
Would you mind telling me a little bit about your role at the moment at Beyond Blue and what else you have been doing in the background over the previous years?

DAVID FERBRACHE:
Oh, yes. Thank you, Yvette. Well, I'm the managing director of Beyond Blue, a small boutique consulting firm. We do crisis exercising, operational resilience, and also national cybersecurity strategy advice for clients. So, that's a bit of me. I've been in the field now for 30-odd years, I think. I used to be head of cyber and space with the Ministry of Defence and did a whole range of other things. I was KPMG's global head of cyber futures and I used to chair the Scottish Cyber Resilience Board for John Swinney, as well.

YVETTE ESSEN:
Brilliant. And at the MOD, you were actually awarded an OBE afterwards. Can you tell me a little bit about that and your role on 9/11, I believe?

DAVID FERBRACHE:
It was, yeah. So, one of the roles I was in was helping the Ministry of Defence basically gear up to respond to 9/11. And frankly, I worked with the US, who was hurting and in pain, to develop the intelligence relationship and make sure that we could actually contribute capabilities to the US to help with the hunt for whoever had perpetrated 9/11.

YVETTE ESSEN:
Great. Well, I'm very honored to have you today. You have been the keynote speaker at our conference, Dimensions, with that theme: "Dimensions: Establishing the Foundation for a Resilient Cyber Market." Now, resilience was something you focused on. You called resilience a buzzword. Why is that?

DAVID FERBRACHE:
Well, I think it currently is. And in a sense, cyber is, too. But for me, the reason I'm really focusing on resilience is I've seen the cybersecurity community focus so much, rightly, on how to protect systems against compromise, detect it, and rapidly respond. But sometimes now we're having to work on the assumption that that fails. And we've got a major ransomware event or a major compromise. So for me, it's how do we get resilience to those events? How do we build back quickly? How do we recover? How do we restore? And how do we minimize the impact we have on customers, suppliers, and the markets as we do that. So getting that resilience thinking, for me, is a complement to cybersecurity.

YVETTE ESSEN:
Another theme that you focused on was nation-state activity and geopolitics. What do you expect to happen in this very uncertain environment?

DAVID FERBRACHE:
Oh, my goodness. Yvette, you're asking for crystal ball gazing. Now, come on.

YVETTE ESSEN:
That was the theme of your talk.

DAVID FERBRACHE:
It was a bit of that. I agree. So if I look at it just now, you have to split out the nation-states into separate countries and separate intents. So it's very easy for us to bundle them all together and talk about nation-states. But China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have very different motivations. And what I think we're seeing with certainly maybe Russia and Iran now is that cyber is just part of a broader geopolitical context, and sometimes hybrid warfare as well. So sometimes it's worth putting yourself in the mindset of those countries and the conflicts they're involved in. Cyber for them is a way of projecting power at range. It's a way of attacking beyond the borders. And everything, I think, is linked back to what effect they are really trying to create. So we're going to see that, I think, increase. It's with us now at scale. And there is more targeting of operational technology and critical infrastructure, which is what's worrying governments currently. But that feels very different from some other countries. So for me, it's about thinking about these threat actors, thinking about what they're trying to achieve at the political and strategic level, and then working that down into where cyber fits alongside military, sabotage, and submarine cable attacks even. That's a very different way of thinking about it. So, it's not a separate discipline, but part of a broader way of projecting power at range. So, it's a bit different.

YVETTE ESSEN:
And finally, AI. A lot of the conference was focused on AI. What's your key takeaway on AI today?

DAVID FERBRACHE:
My key takeaway is we're heading into a space for a period of time where there will be an attacker advantage enabled by AI. 

Downstream that might not be the case, actually. So, AI gives us a real opportunity to test our systems, to probe, and to remove some of the bugs and the vulnerabilities that have been latent, having been lying there for years. Anthropic has found a vulnerability in BSD Unix that's decades old. But for a period of time, I think the adversaries will have an advantage if they can harness AI to support targeting and reconnaissance, use deep fakes credibly, and probe vulnerabilities and exploits. And we really need to work together to close that gap. So, as quickly as possible, we must test our own systems to plug the vulnerabilities, but also AI-enable our own defenses. And we must do that in partnership between the public sector and the private sector as well. There's a lot of data out there, but we can sometimes be quite fragmented in the way we fuse it, analyze it, and use it to help our response. So, AI for me is both an enabler and a challenge.

YVETTE ESSEN:
Great. David, thank you for your time today, sharing your insights and also for being our keynote speaker.

DAVID FERBRACHE:
It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Yvette.

YVETTE ESSEN:
At the Dimensions conference in London at Fishmongers' Hall, I'm Yvette Eason.