Spain has received quite a few cyber attacks in the last two years although their impact has been “irrelevant.” Despite this, the Ministry of Defense does not let its guard down considering that the threat in this field is “increasingly sophisticated” and that, “at any time, a more severe incident may occur.”
This is clear from the dialogue on ‘Digital and technological transformation of Spanish Defense’, organized by Servimedia, which included the participation of five experts from the Center for Information and Communications Systems and Technologies (Cestic) and Inserta Innovación.
They all boarded the challenge of cybersecurity, from the perspective of those in charge of providing information and telecommunications services to the Ministry of Defense in all its operations and needs at a global level. All Spanish soldiers deployed anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, communicate with Spain, thanks to the government created by the satellites and the work of this institution, which protects the Department’s network that watches over the entire country.
“We can’t relax”
The second head of Cestic and deputy director general of Information and Telecommunications Plans and Services, Colonel Pablo Moreno, explained that although each of the armies has its information and communications systems, Cestic “provides new satellite services to ongoing operations,” that go through logistics and personnel management, to calls to a family from inside a bunker.
In this context, this institution is one of the main guarantors of cybersecurity for the entire Ministry of Defense. Colonel Gregorio Pulido, head of Cybersecurity within the organization, directs the operations center in which they “monitor and monitor what is happening permanently” within the Ministry of Defense network. In his opinion, Spain “cannot relax” because at any moment “a more severe incident” could occur than those that have arrived so far, which have had an “irrelevant” impact. “The risk is there,” he said.
All the information that travels through the satellite systems is protected and controlled by Cestic teams that encrypt and decrypt the information with applications so that everything is secure. The threat, Pulido warned, “is increasingly sophisticated,” so you have to “have tools that are at the level of that threat” to have “adequate protection.”
Zero trust paradigm
Security is necessary for the path that information takes and it is also crucial that the infrastructure is secure. “Preventive cybersecurity measures are the most important thing,” Moreno said. In that line, stressed the need to protect technological infrastructures as much as possible against attackers, but at the same time providing the required service. “There is only a secure system that is disconnected, but it would not provide any service.”
In this context, Cestic services are beginning to work from the “zero trust paradigm” that was approved in July and is in the implementation phase. As Pulido described, it consists of assuming that “any user not only accesses from the protection perimeter” of the Ministrybut from other locations through the cloud and that “the network has already been compromised”, so you have to have “tools to work in these degradation situations.” “The classic cybersecurity paradigm, where perimeter defenses are, no longer works,” he said.
This also applies to the devices the military themselves work with, which have sophisticated applications to prevent incursions. These systems mean that if an alert is detected you can “absolutely lock the phone”Moreno stated. Likewise, if the platform detects that the user is in a “very, very dangerous” site, all data will be completely deleted and the mobile phone will be deleted remotely from our facilities.
European army
This criterion is shared with NATO, which already works in this way while delving into data-centric security. Pulido related that in this organization Spain participates in working groups where “protocols are discussed from the point of view of interoperability” in order to “share information”.
“The most important thing is that when there is some type of incident, we open communication with them and share those indicators of commitment that make it easier for us to investigate what is happening on our networks,” he exemplified.
With this collaboration, Colonel Moreno believes that the possibility of a European army “would not be difficult” because there are “many joint exercises and operations” in which “the staff works with the same procedures.
Cestic has nearly 1,000 employees and it is important that in addition to being trained and aware of cybersecurity, as Pulido explains, are “motivated”, have a “resilient” mind and that the challenge of guaranteeing the security of the Ministry from anywhere on the planet “is attractive to them.”
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