Reviewing National Cybersecurity Strategies

The damages caused by cyber-attacks are becoming larger, broader and more serious and to include monetary losses and losses of lifeline. Some cyber-attacks are arguably suspected to be parts of national campaigns. Under such circumstances, the public sector must endeavour to enhance the national cybersecurity capacities. There are several benchmarks for national cybersecurity, i.e., a snapshot relative assessment of a nation’s cybersecurity strength at a global level. However, by considering the development of technology, attackers’ skills and capacities of other nations, we believe that it is more important to review the national strategy for cybersecurity capacity enhancement and to ensure that the national capacity advances adequately in the coming years. We propose a method of reviewing national strategies. Additionally, we performed a trial review of the Japanese cybersecurity strategy using the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CSCMMN) developed by the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre. This trial proved to be workable because it detected various possibly inadequate (insufficient, inappropriate or inefficient, although further investigation is needed) approaches in the Japanese strategy. Moreover, the review also discovered the shortcomings of the capacity areas in the CSCMMN. We plan to improve the reviewing method and develop the improvement process of national strategies for cybersecurity capacity enhancement.