Ms Lorena Boix Alonso:

There is not much I can add. Technically, submarine cables are covered by the NIS directive. Is it enough? That is a different question. I am perfectly aware of the issue and debate around it. Defence considerations are beyond my remit because I am dealing with civil matters, but our president is very aware of these issues. She insisted on them in her state of the union speech. We are very much in contact with our colleagues in the Directorate-General for Defence, Industry and Space, DG DEFIS, dealing with defence, on the need to push a cyber defence strategy. We are certainly discussing those issues with the colleagues in DG DEFIS because there are clear synergies in these fields.

The Deputy mentioned the issue of skills. I reassure him that things are being done on the issue of skills on two different fronts. Two types of skills are needed in the cyber area. One is the basic cyber skills whereby people know and are aware where attacks could come from or how to identify phishing and things like that. Those are the basic cyber skills. There is also the extremely worrying subject of specialist cybersecurity. We have a huge shortage of those skills, not only in Europe but in the world. There are not enough specialists. We need to keep up our knowledge because the nasty guys and girls are becoming extremely sophisticated. Those are the two types of skills we need to deal with, and the Commission is doing so now, at least from the point of view of funding. In the digital EU programme that I mentioned before, there is money available for universities and workforces to help in specialisation and providing specialist courses on cybersecurity. We are acting to try to cope with the gap. We must also act on basic cyber skills. As was mentioned before, we had cybersecurity month. Within the competence and education we have, we try to take action but there is certainly an issue around both basic cyber skills and specialist cyber skills to cope with the level of sophistication we are facing right now.