The UK tech sector is failing to incentivize companies to build and roll out secure software products, according to NCSC chief technology office Ollie Whitehouse.
In a keynote address at the CYBERUK conference in Birmingham, Whitehouse highlighted the steep rise in software product vulnerabilities in recent years, warning that the scale of the issue is placing businesses and individuals across the country at risk.
But the current state of the market means that companies building resilient products aren’t fully rewarded for their efforts. Firms across the country “know how to design and build resilient, secure technology,” he said, but the next key focus must be to build a market that “supports and rewards it”.
"We have security products which contain vulnerability classes that we have known about for over 70 years or 24 years, depending on how you count them, being discovered and exploited in our edge perimeters in 2024.
"For the last four years, the numbers of '22 to '23, we saw a 14% increase in disclosed vulnerabilities, bringing us to 29,000 but in addition to that what we saw was 40,000 vulnerabilities registered, which is also similarly a 14% increase."
Whitehouse described what he called a ‘thousand Band-Aid’ approach to cyber security - the tendency for organizations to layer sticking plasters over security cracks in an attempt to address technical debt. For the UK to become a truly cyber resilient nation, that approach needs to fundamentally change, he said.
Concerningly, Whitehouse warned that current legal frameworks are not keeping up with the pace of technological change, and is likely never to do so.
He called for developers to be honest about the profound challenges they are facing, in order to develop products and services that are fit for purpose and for a resilient future.
"The world is changing, fast, and we are facing a fundamental challenge: we don’t have the evidence for how to build a resilient country writ large," he said.
"The challenges ahead of us are the horse-sized ducks of states with strategic intentions, and the duck-sized horses of criminal actors out for financial gain. And the reality is that we don’t get to choose which one we’d rather counter, because we have to be able to face both with confidence."
Candid remarks welcomed by industry
Gareth Pritchard, CTO at security firm Sapphire, welcomed Whitehouse’s comments, adding that if boards continue to only see cyber as a ‘one and done’ transformation program, commercial market forces won’t fix the lingering technical debt and problems cited in his keynote.
There must be a steadfast focus on cyber security as a cultural foundation for businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors, Pritchard noted.
"Taking an evidence-based approach to security whilst implementing good security hygiene is vital to our continued fight against cyber threats," he said.
"We all must take on the challenge posed by Ollie as it is through collaboration and collective action that we will drive the market to make cyber security a core foundation of our business operations, products, and services that we all rely on.”
