RUSI Insights Inform UK Parliamentary Joint Committee Report on Ransomware
There is now a “high risk” of a catastrophic ransomware attack occurring in the UK “at any moment”, with Government planning lacking and being held “hostage to fortune”.
That’s according to a new report from the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, published on 13 December 2023, which draws extensively on Royal United Service Institute expertise, including recent reports on:
The Committee’s report also drew on written evidence submitted by RUSI’s Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies and the Institute’s Cyber Research Group, as well as the oral and written evidence provided by RUSI Research Fellow Jamie MacColl between April and May 2023.
Commenting on the Committee’s report, Jamie MacColl said:
The inquiry report is one of the clearest articulations to date of the challenges posed by ransomware. Although it is rightly critical of the UK government’s record on ransomware, it is important to remember that other national governments have also struggled to find ways to meaningfully shift the cost-benefit calculus of Russian ransomware groups, who continue to wreak havoc.
Jamie MacColl
Research Fellow
A Commentary piece authored by Jamie and addressing these key themes around the ransomware challenge, titled Organised Cybercrime: The Rise of Ransomware as a National Security Threat, has been published on the RUSI website today, here. To find out more about the work of RUSI’s Cyber research group, you can read more here.