Security News > 2021 > May > Britain to spend £22m influencing Indo-Pacific nations' cybersecurity policies against 'authoritarian regimes'

Britain is to spend £22m on training African and Indo-Pacific nations to stave off cyber influences from "Authoritarian regimes", foreign secretary Dominic Raab said today.

"I'm very pleased to announce that the UK government will invest £22m in new funding to support cyber capacity building in those vulnerable countries," said Raab at the CyberUK conference this morning, making his single policy pledge in the speech.

The Foreign Secretary said the money will go towards "National cyber response teams" mostly in Africa, with the stated intent being "To improve cooperation on cyber investigations" into potentially nation state-backed attacks on companies and digital-dependent infrastructure.

"From my perspective, at least from a diplomatic point of view we've got to be agile, we've got to work with traditional partners, but also with new partners. Just take ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which I mentioned earlier, that's a good example," continued Raab, highlighting Singapore's Cyber Security Centre of Excellence.

The move builds on the Integrated Defence Review published earlier this year, which promised an expansion of UK cyber-policy amid heavy overuse of the word "Cyber".

In terms of cyber enemies, the foreign sec named "Authoritarian regimes like North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, who use digital tech to sabotage and to steal, or to control and censor," neatly skirting around the censorship-lite shambles that is Britain's Online Harms Bill, published today in Parliament for the first time.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/cyberuk_dominic_raab_22m_indopacific/