Global threats must be met with global actions. Cyber attacks, with criminal and economical motives, have a global platform through the Internet. The ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda can provide us with a platform for response and I welcome this initiative.

The term Resilience is one of the “buzz-words” in this business today. Let me give my views on what is needed to achieve better resilience. I will illustrate this with examples of the work carried out in Sweden.

• Firstly, we need a stable, robust infrastructure, well protected against for example sabotage. Protecting important communication lines and nodes in the networks must be given priority. In Sweden we have placed the most important exchanges in underground bunkers. Creating redundancy and thus reducing vulnerability in the networks on a broader scale are of vital importance.
  
• Secondly, we need cooperation between stakeholders regarding logical attacks – cyber attacks. Many countries have computer emergency response teams (CERT), governmental or private. Cooperation between CERTS should be evolved further. In Sweden we have a government CERT with a staff of 15 people, prepared to go into 24/7 operation. Our CERT is involved in an extensive international cooperation with CERTs throughout the world.
• Finally, we need to train our abilities. On a national level, Sweden has had two big exercises focused on IT and telecommunications. The next one is planned for spring 2009. We need to find ways to exercise more on an international level, as I believe that practical exercise is the best way to pin-point vulnerabilities and show us where cooperation and communication fails in emergency situations .

Sweden will have the EU presidency during the second half of 2009. The last time we were in that position we raised these questions to the EU level for the first time. One result of this is that the European Commission created the ENISA agency for coordinating, giving recommendations, promoting cooperation and raise awareness in the field of Internet security. I believe and hope that our upcoming EU presidency again will reflect our will to promote these issues.

I am happy to see this high level meeting putting cybersecurity as one of the top priorities for ITU and believe that this initiative indeed will strengthen our resilience against the threats from cyber crime. We must be determined not to let cyber crime affect the realisation of the potentials arising from the information society.

Thank you!