Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Cyber Security myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Cyber security must be a national priority to safeguard data troves that are driving big advances in fields including public health but face growing potential risks as they expand, the UK’s new science minister has said.Digital security was “at the forefront” of official thinking after high-profile ransom attacks and IT breakdowns showed the need to boost defences against hackers and back-up storage options, Lord Patrick Vallance said.His remarks underscore how harnessing the power of bulk data has stoked extraordinary technological progress while creating bigger targets for criminals and hostile states. The proposed cyber security and resilience bill announced in the King’s Speech last week showed Sir Keir Starmer’s government saw the urgency of action, according to Vallance.“The reason why that’s been announced so early during this government is the recognition that we do need to get that fit for current use and indeed as future-proofed as possible,” he said. “We are in a world where there will be cyber attacks, and so the appropriate back-up facilities, storage facilities and so on become important.”Vallance was speaking ahead of the government’s announcement on Thursday that Amazon Web Services, a unit of the US tech company, will supply cloud computing storage access worth about £8mn to the vast UK Biobank genetic database. Data from the facility containing 500,000 people’s records has yielded discoveries in areas from potential Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics to how some modern vulnerabilities to medical conditions are rooted in ancient migration patterns.While Vallance said Biobank had digital security “well covered”, he highlighted a series of cyber attacks on national facilities, including the National Health Service. A ransomware hack on the Synnovis public-private partnership in June has disrupted healthcare for thousands of patients registered with big London hospitals.Vallance pointed to the additional risk of non-malicious disruption to digital infrastructure — a danger underlined by last week’s global IT outage, which left most GP surgeries in England unable to access patient record systems.Necessary cyber protections must avoid going “so far in one direction” that they stopped the kind of data sharing used by Biobank to power groundbreaking scientific research around the world, he added.“[Then] you end up clamping things down when, of course, in many cases, you want an open access policy of some sort, as for Biobank,” he said. “So I think this is a very key issue to get right.”Vallance was made a peer and appointed by Starmer after this month’s general election as one of several ministers picked from outside Labour party politics because of their expertise. He is a former government chief scientific adviser and president of research and development at pharmaceuticals company GSK, as well as an ex-Biobank board member.Science and technology had to be “central to what the government does”, given their capacity to improve economic growth, societal wellbeing and national resilience and security, Vallance said. Labour must promote “basic, curiosity-driven science”, as well as improving on the UK’s patchy record of making the most of its impressive innovation pipeline, he said.“We’ve got a very good number of start-ups,” Vallance added. “We’re just not doing well enough on the scale-up and the ability to turn those into sustainable companies.”Leading businesses and universities this week urged Starmer to turn the Oxford and Cambridge region into the “crown jewel” of European innovation. Representatives from other parts of the UK with strong research capacity are likely to make their own pitches.
