Dr. Richard Browne:

It would be silly to suggest that we are in any way invulnerable. Every country and every entity with an Internet connection is vulnerable to some type of incident. Cybersecurity incidents are uniquely complex because of the nested nature of systems. This organisation, every organisation and every individual depend on a networked series of services. It is impossible in some ways to predict what will happen if entity X, Y or Z is affected. It is not just whether we are vulnerable, but understanding the detailed, nested set of dependencies in that vulnerability. We have completed, and it is in the strategy, our most recent risk assessment of critical infrastructure. We have a fairly detailed understanding - I will not say it is 100% comprehensive - of the primary nest of dependencies.

We are lucky in some ways. This is a small State. We have a relatively resilient infrastructure and we have a relatively limited number of touch points, but there will always be challenges. Our role has been to prepare the critical services. We have started with critical, but we will go beyond that in due course to make sure that as many people as possible are aware of and up to speed on this. We face a challenge. To be blunt about it, we have lived for a long time with a benign external security environment. Cybersecurity and the rise and development of these types of cross-cutting, deeply-enmeshed threats pose a new challenge for this State, which we are dealing with without some of the institutional architecture that other states have had in the past. That means we have to invent things and systems as we go. In some ways, that is an advantage because what we are doing is not last year's problem, but this year's problem.