Ms Nicole Eagan – the CEO of a UK cybersecurity start-up’s who was part of Prime Minister’s trade delegation to Asia – says government-level cooperation, together with cybersecurity tech, will help make the digital space a safer place to be.
SINGAPORE: On the back of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom signing a Memorandum of Understanding on cybersecurity cooperation on Wednesday (Jul 29), the chief executive officer of Darktrace – a Britain-based IT security vendor – said: “If nations collaborate, bad guys have no place to hide.”
Ms Nicole Eagan echoed the words spoken by British Prime Minister David Cameron during a speech he gave here on Tuesday, saying that technology such as those provided by her company and other security vendors help “shine bright lights” on the bad guys, which would restrict the digital space they can operate in.
In an interview with Channel NewsAsia on Wednesday before the MoU was announced, Ms Eagan said her company would help “implement aspects of the MoU”, but declined to elaborate.
The MoU covered cooperation in four areas, according to the CSA press release:
- Cooperation between Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and exchanges to enhance cybersecurity incident response
- Extension of joint cyber research and development (R&D) collaboration between the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Singapore’s National Research Foundation, with the doubling of funding from S$2.5 million to S$5.1 million for academic research over three years
- Talent development and awareness building by collaborating with the UK Cyber Security Challenge for a Singapore edition of a new Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) – the UK’s first international partner to licence an area of the MMOG
- Sharing of best practices for business and industry in the protection of systems, quality of cybersecurity products and services and technical services
More details of the cooperation will be finalised during the next UK-Singapore Cyber Dialogue planned for later this year, and the CERT agreement scheduled in September, CSA added.
FUNDAMENTAL NEW APPROACH NEEDED
Ms Eagan noted that while sharing of information has value, whether at the corporate or government level, sometimes it is “limited”. Threat intelligence shared tend to be updates from the day before, and most cyberattackers can simply change a line of code to evade detection, she noted.
Furthermore, such information cannot inform companies or organisations of unusual activities or “unknown bads”, or threats, lying dormant within one’s network, she added.
As such, a “fundamental new approach” is needed when it comes to cybersecurity, and this can be achieved through machine learning, she said.
Darktrace’s product is in essence a software that passively monitors the network. Ms Eagan likens it to the human body’s immune system – it will not know when an attack will take place, but “because it has a sense of self”, it is able to detect activities or patterns that are out of the ordinary.
“There are no rules or assumption made beforehand, unlike other security products in the market,” she said. “It is also passively, and not actively, monitoring so it doesn’t affect sensitive operations such as a bank’s financial trading.”
The CEO said the company started with enterprise networks, before moving to industrial control systems such as SCADA. It got its big break when telecom operator BT engaged its service in 2015, allowing Darktrace to scale its service to half a million devices that were on the client’s network.
“For a company like BT to take a chance on a start-up like us gave us the confidence to move beyond the usual academic projects associated with machine learning and scale up,” Ms Eagan said. The company was founded in 2013 by machine learning specialists and government intelligence experts.
She also felt the company’s product could prove to be a good fit for the Republic’s Smart Nation initiative, as it adheres to privacy laws in Europe, which are known to be one of the strictest globally. Its product passively monitors network traffic, and does not look into the data packet’s content – something that she said is the “most straight-forward and safest” for implementation.
Darktrace Managing Director for Asia Pacific Sanjay Aurora told Channel NewsAsia that the company is in talks with government organisations and other corporations with regard to the Smart Nation initiative, but stopped short of giving more details.
Ms Eagan added that while the company does not have a product specific to the Internet of Things, it is involved with companies in this area on a project basis. Just like its enterprise and industrial control system products, having an IoT-specific product is a case of “tweaking the algorithm” to suit the relevant environment, she said.
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