Countries around the world have awoken to the risks of cyber attacks on their systems launched by criminals, hacktivists, terrorists and rogue nation states.

As of January 2012, we found twenty-two countries have established cyber defense centers in an effort to enhance both their offense, defensive and cyber intelligence capabilities.

One of them is Iran. In fact, PressTV reported that just recently Iran held its first ever cyber conference. Iran’s top military officers, cyber security experts, academics and government officials gathered in Tehran to address these numerous issues surrounding this topic.

Establishing a proper cyber strategy is not an easy task. It takes time and a fair amount of cyber intelligence to properly craft the proper approach to offensive, defensive and cyber intelligence collection and analysis methods.

While many talk about cyber strategies, when you examine what they define as a “strategy” it is usually a tactical or operational plan.

Britain placed cyber security as a tier 1 priority. Last November Britain established their cyber strategy. Analysis of public information on their cyber strategy resulted in the identification of three stratagems.

1. Cyber security approach to support and protect the country’s economic prosperity
2. Cyber security approach to defend and safeguard the public’s way of life
3. Cyber security approach to offensive, defensive and intelligence capabilities in the pursuit of protect national security

Like all strategies, the devil is in the details and there is not enough detailed information to assess the appropriateness of the Brit’s strategy. It will be interesting to see how frequently they review and update their cyber strategy given the highly dynamic characteristics associated with the cyber domain.

This is a battle of the minds. One thing that is certain, without out-of-the-box thinking about this national security priority, theses strategies will fall short.

Kevin G. Coleman is a long-time security technology executive and former Chief Strategist at Netscape. He is Senior Fellow with the Technolytics Institute, where he provides consulting services on strategic technology and security issues. He writes weekly for Breaking Gov on the topic of cyber intelligence.