A healthy innovation ecosystem is crucial for states to handle cybersecurity threats. Traditional methods and procedures simply will not do. “After a couple of years, if you're successful, you'll have a solution, for example the Iron Dome”, explains Dr. Amit Sheniak of the Federmann Cyber Security Center, the Truman Institute, and the Davis Institute. “Until you did that long process, went through all the bureaucracy – the change already evolved, moved on, inflicted harm, and you couldn't mitigate it. Hence, governments understand today that the way to tackle those threats in terms of research and development is to create some kind of outsourcing scheme”.

What does it look like from the state’s point of view? “We have part of the resources, but know that we don't know anything - we know only part of the way to do something”, says Adv. Eynan Lichterman of the Israel National Cyber Directorate. “There's a lot of knowledge in the academia, there's a lot of knowledge in the industry, in the NGOs, and so on. We have to work together in order to make something bigger than any one of us”.

An often unspoken yet crucial actor in the cybersecurity ecosystem is the law, says Adv. Deborah Housen-Couriel, a member of the advisory board of the Federmann Cyber Security Center, and an attorney with a practice in the Israeli and global commercial cyber sector. According to Housen-Couriel, “I would start out with looking at the basic underpinnings that a legal system gives to the incentives for setting up a cyber hub or other kinds of cyber ecosystems. Then there's a second piece, which is I think is often overlooked, but really key and also developing, and that's the issue of data protection”.

Join us in this episode of Lex Cybernetica with our host Ido Kenan.

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