The MoU sets out the intention of both organisations to work together to help protect personal data from cyberattacks by:

• sharing technical information from cyber incident investigations (but no personal data), where appropriate, and where it is related to cybercrime and fraud;
• sharing and exchanging information and intelligence to enhance the ability to identify cyber threats, risks and trends; and
• joint research or studies to improve each parties’ understanding of the cyber landscape, including its size, those operating therein and the business models they are adopting.

The Global Cyber Alliance is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to reducing cyber risk. Since its founding in 2015, the organisation has embarked on various efforts to achieve its mission: the founding of Quad9, a global protective DNS service that blocks an average of 60 million malicious domains a day, lobbying for the deployment of the email authentication protocol known as DMARC, and the publication of a series of free cybersecurity toolkits aimed at helping small businesses, journalists, and election officials (US) improve their cyber security based on best practices defined by the Centre for Internet Security and the UK National Cyber Security Centre.

In a statement, Steve Eckersley, Director of Investigations at the ICO, said that with cyber attacks on the increase on a global scale, “there needs to be a more collaborative approach to tackling them”. He said that the ICO will be working with the Global Cyber Alliance to “share and exchange information to achieve our common goal to reduce UK cybercrime, reduce cyber risk and improve cyber security”. The aim is ‘to prevent these harmful attacks which impact not just the organisations they are targeted at, but the people whose personal data is compromised”. To read the ICO statement in full and for a link to the MoU and other relevant documents, click here.