RUSI Resilience Essay Prize 2015 Announced

The Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Essay Prize has been announced. This year’s topic was ‘Resilience 2050: A Blueprint for the Future’.

We are delighted to say one of these, on space security – written by Dr Liviu Muresan and Alexandru Georgescu of the EURISC Foundation, Romania – was the overall winner. It will be published in the RUSI Journal in February 2016, and we will be reproducing the essay on the PaCCS website then.

The other essay submitted by PaCCS came third in the overall competition. The author is Ryan Meeks, of Frazer-Nash Consultancy, and he examines the insider threat. We reproduce the essay here.

In summary the essay on the insider threat suggests that we will continue to see an increase in such attacks until organisations and governments put more stringent and informed mitigations in place.

The author asserts that human psychology lies at the heart of the problem of insider attack, which becomes more severe as we move into a more interconnected world, where the relationship between humans and technology becomes more essential. He recommends that organisations put the importance of the insider threat on a par with threats such as physical and cyber security; governments and industry within the CNI should establish insider threat management plans, teams and programmes that take a holistic approach i.e. tackling both the human and technical elements.

Read Ryan Meeks’ essay A Resilient Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) in the age of the “internet of things” – Stemming the ‘Ripple Effect’ of Insider Threat attacks on connected systems towards 2050