Richard Browne

I think it's really important to note that our job is to essentially look for wolves among, I don't know, sheep or prickly angry sheep.

We get lots of incidents.

Many of them are essentially inconsequential.

They're dealt with in an automated way by onsite security systems in departments or agencies or companies, and they're notified to us just for the intelligence value.

Some more, however, do require us to step up.

We have a very well-established, well-rehearsed system for responding to incidents up to national crisis.

So we essentially, when we get an incident, every time we get one, we triage it on that basis.

How serious is this?

What is the likely impact?

What do we need to do to ensure that the state's requirements are met?

So this is just what we do.

It is a good thing that people aren't aware of these because it means the consequences aren't being felt.

It's when they are felt that we have a problem.

To a degree, yes.

So, I mean, just to go back for a second, we obviously engage with colleagues across Europe on a daily basis, sharing threat intelligence, receiving their threat intelligence and a whole range of other types of activities.

As part of the wind-up to the presidency, we've gone off and conducted a full formal cyber threat assessment to run the presidency, truly engaging with the last seven or eight or nine different presidency cybersecurity entities, so our colleagues in other European countries.

jurisdictions.

And they've all seen, if you look at Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, they've all seen relatively significant increases in cyber incidents in certain cases.

So that's not to say that things go bad for the entire six months.

It's much more likely that during periods within the presidency, when there is politically sensitive