MCSC 2019: Dirk Hoke

Why talking about cybersecurity? Maybe to give you a bit of a backstory on how I got in contact with cyber the first time. It was still in my former job where I was responsible for building industrial services, including digital services, at Siemens. There were a couple of government initiatives like Industry 4.0, also the Smart Service World, digital services integrating into it, and I had a lot of discussion. We were selling digital services and cybersecurity services to companies, and I had a lot of discussions with CEO level of large companies at that time. What was interesting at that time—this is only nine years ago—everyone was saying, 'We will not go into the cloud, we will stay on-premises, we hold our important data.' They said, 'We will not spend hundreds of millions on cybersecurity because nothing happened so far. Tell me where someone really had to spend a billion on cybersecurity.' Now, only eight or nine years later, look what happened. Being here, you see the crowd being interested in that. It's changing rapidly, of course, because of the technology change. We see the society changing and we see our industries changing. It has happened in many of our industries already. It's a bit slower in our industrial area, and now we have to realize it is something that will not stop. And we are totally endangered as well.

Airbus: 135,000 employees located all over the world, mainly of course in Europe. A lot of production sites—civil aircraft, helicopters, defense, and space. We're not only a product and platform provider; we're also a digital service provider with a lot of new digital services we're bringing into the market right now. You heard about Skywise, where we're connecting our airlines in order to improve predictive and preventive maintenance. We do the same thing for military helicopters and military craft, which is called Smart Force. So we become really a data provider as well, and with that, we have to protect ourselves.

We do this for internal purposes—protect our sites. We have five SOCs in order to run our digital services, not only for our internal clients but also for our external clients. Because on top, inside Defense and Space, we have our own cybersecurity business with almost 1,000 employees located in several countries, trying to protect not only our own premises but also especially governments and critical infrastructure. We're not trying to do everything; we know we are limited. So we try to concentrate on what we're best at, protect the things we're good at, and then on top, we partner with the best of breed. Because the world is constantly changing so fast, we don't think that any one company is good enough to be a common partner for the next 10 or 20 years. We travel a lot, we visit a lot of cybersecurity companies, and if you go especially to Israel, you see so many changes so fast that you constantly have to adapt yourself in order to stay ahead of the crowd.

What we also see, and this is part of our business as well, is it's about trusted information. More and more, it will make a difference to ensure that the data generated is exactly the data consumed. How sure are you the video or the audio that you hear is the original? How sure are you that this context was not created artificially? As we have seen in many examples with the speech of Obama, we have seen that. I don't know if you have seen the news—Huawei smartphones where you have sensor technology in, you can change the video immediately on the spot and you cannot see the difference anymore. So it's very difficult to judge what was the original information and what is the information that has been consumed. For us, this is a major context, especially for the future.

We already have some limitations because we're a European company working in defense. For our home countries, we have four classified domains. On top, we have an international domain so that I can communicate with my employees. So we already have a lot of restriction in order to protect ourselves, but how can we take what we learn to our clients? This is important for the next generation of platforms that we want to create. You hear a lot about Eurodrone. Eurodrone will not only be a European project on drones; it will also be a connected platform. And on top, it will be developed for the first time in a connected environment, where we will not only work on a plateau with our launch customers, launch countries, and our partners like Dassault and Leonardo. We will work also on one software platform. So we have to ensure that we do this in a totally secure environment and that we ensure, especially in the future of missions, that data and missions are protected. This is absolutely crucial for us.

This is also a prerequisite in order to go into what we call the Future Combat Air System. This is a long-term development. We just hope you saw the signature on the 6th of February by the defense ministers from France and Germany to start a joint study for the Future Combat Air System. This is now really the foundation to create a real European project—not only a sixth-generation fighter, but including, and this is the most important part, a system of systems. A system of systems means connected systems—not only new systems but also existing systems: marine, air, on land. Connecting all the existing systems and sharing information across countries, across different systems, is what we also declare. The question is: how European are we at the end? Will we be able to share the intelligence that we have in a national silo? Do we want to share that in order to make the whole system more intelligent and to act based on smart algorithms in a totally connected system?

For us, cybersecurity will be absolutely crucial in order to prove that we can run these systems in a secure way in the future, that we can protect our national countries, and that we are able to secure communication and connectivity at all times. If we cannot build that trust, it will be very difficult to stabilize these kinds of projects. As our society is built on trust, we have to ask ourselves: are we prepared in Europe, especially now, are we prepared enough in order to protect that trust? If the financial system, if infrastructure, if governments, if industry are not safe, we will have a problem to stabilize the way forward. Cybersecurity, in my opinion, will be a crucial part of it. So we will continue to invest—not just some more money, but big money—doing it for our own protection, but also doing it on a larger scale. What we clearly demand for the future is closer cooperation between industry but also with government, to create a push-pull system about threat analysis and also counter protection. This is something which is really, really slow today—the communication between companies and countries. This is something we definitely have to increase.

A lot of activities that I see are good, where shared fear was created over the last two years, but it's only a nucleus, it's a foundation. This needs to be grown and extended. So I hope that these kinds of conferences will help us to increase cooperation between governments and companies and ensure that also in the world of tomorrow we have the guarantee that the information created is the information that we use. Thank you very much.