Legacy Systems and Policies Expose West to Cyber Disruption

Adversaries’ ability to monitor and disrupt Western critical infrastructure demands a major shift in cybersecurity priorities as well as thinking, said Ciaran Martin, an Oxford professor who’s also the director of SANS Institute’s CISO Network.

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Martin said any suggestions that cyberattacks are getting exponentially worse are incorrect. “I hate hype in cybersecurity, it’s really, really damaging,” he said. At the same time, a number of high-profile attacks by ransomware groups, as well as nation states, do highlight specific shortcomings and risks.

Take Beijing-backed Volt Typhoon, which has been quietly planting “digital booby traps” across Western critical infrastructure, designed to be activated if tensions escalate, thus posing a “military disruptive threat,” he said. Another group, Salt Typhoon, poses a different type of risk – a “strategic espionage threat” – lately bolstered by its audacious infiltration of Western telecommunications infrastructure.

Countering such threats requires getting smarter about resilience, while also not overstating adversaries’ capabilities. “We’ve been obsessed with Chinese technology, and there’s been huge controversies about Salt Typhoon … but Salt Typhoon has got nothing to do with Chinese infrastructure. It’s all weakly secured, out-of-date Western infrastructure,” Martin said. “The major lesson is we need to be better at continuity of service, at being resilient to disruption and resilient to the loss of a major network.”

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at Infosecurity Europe 2025, Martin also discussed:

• Why aging infrastructure complicates threat detection and cyber defense;
• The risk deepfakes might pose to democracy and public trust, and their potential to mislead isolated groups or vulnerable individuals;
• Building on cybersecurity success stories, and finding new opportunities for innovation.

Martin is a leading global authority on cybersecurity. He served as the first CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre, a public-facing arm of intelligence agency GCHQ. With more than 20 years of experience in the U.K. government, he worked directly with five prime ministers and several senior ministers across three political parties. In addition to now working with the SANS Institute, he’s a professor of practice at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government.