Cyber Monitoring Centre launched with former NCSC head at helm

Founding NCSC chief executive Ciaran Martin to join as technical committee chair

The newly launched Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) has announced the appointment of its Technical Committee to be chaired by Ciaran Martin.

A non-profit organisation, the CMC aims to help businesses by categorising cyber events on a scale of one to five based on how widespread they are and their financial impact to UK organisations. The goal is to bring greater clarity and transparency to a complex field and to enable greater cyber resiliency.

The CMC will work with partner organisations to gather relevant data about cyber events which will then be reviewed by its Technical Committee to determine their categorisation.

The Technical Committee will be chaired by Ciaran Martin, who previously set up and led the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and is a leading advisor to a number of governments on cyber security.

Ciaran Martin commented: "I am excited to be involved in the Cyber Monitoring Centre. It addresses a key challenge in UK cyber risk response, namely trying to quantify the impact of systemic cyber events as they are occurring. This whole area of measuring the severity of incidents has proved a really tricky one but if we can crack it we can hugely improve the way we deal with cyber security."

Martin is joined by other UK leading cyber experts including: Sadie Creese, Professor of Cyber Security at the University of Oxford and previously of QinetiQ and the Ministry of Defence, Dan Jeffery Managing Director at Daintta and previously Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for NHS Blood and Transplant and lead for the NHS's National Cyber Programme, Jamie MacColl, Research Fellow in cyber security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and Julian Williams , Head of the Department of Finance at Durham University, and formerly Director of the Durham University Institute of Hazard Risk and Resilience.

CEO of the CMC, William Mayes, added: "Entirely independent of any one company, organisation or sector and made of individuals with extensive and different experiences, our Technical Committee is a vital component to ensure a trusted event categorisation. I am delighted that we have attracted such high calibre individuals to this innovative and valuable initiative and am confident that our committee will become viewed as a reliable, expert assessor of systemic cyber events."

The CMC will be in development throughout 2024, with event categorisations methodology being tested and improved. This means that event categorisation will not be made public this year and the CMC and Technical Committee will learn from events to improve the categorisation methodology.

Event categorisation will start being released publicly in 2025.