“Cybersecurity is prone to a lot of gloom. Looking back, lots of very serious people have predicted catastrophe; there've been a lot of problems, but the catastrophe hasn’t happened,” says Ciaran Martin, Professor of Practice at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and founding CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Martin was speaking with The Stack shortly coming off-stage at Infosecurity Europe 2025, where he had just given a rundown on cybersecurity trends past, present, and potentially future.
His own sharp awakening to the space came courtesy of the ILOVEYOU virus of May 2000, one of the first major computer worms to affect businesses around the world.
“Back then, I was working as a junior Treasury official; I’d been issued with my first remote access laptop, and it got done, because they all did; because almost everybody fell for it,” he recalls.
