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Quad issued a strong warning against state-sponsored hostile cyber operations and said we are dedicated to an open, safe, stable, accessible and peaceful cyberspace
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The Quad Nations—India, Australia, Japan and the United States—have issued a strong warning against state-sponsored hostile cyber operations and pledged to work together to ensure the security and resilience of regional cyberinfrastructure.
After a meeting between US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa, nations were urged to take necessary actions to address ransomware operations coming from their own territory.
The meeting took place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York.
The joint statement read, "We exercise the duty to assist each other in the face of hostile cyber activities, including ransomware, against critical infrastructure."
The Quad countries are dedicated to an open, safe, stable, accessible and peaceful cyberspace and support regional initiatives aimed at boosting nations' ability to put the UN Framework for Responsible State Behavior in Cyberspace into practice, according to the foreign ministers.
The ministers reaffirmed this by recalling their meeting on 11 February to combat the global ransomware menace, which has hampered Indo-Pacific security and economic growth.
Foreign ministers agreed that Ransomware's global reach can put our national security, the financial and commercial sectors and key infrastructure in danger, and individuals' privacy can also be threatened.
Also, the Quad countries pledged to continue working together on capacity-building projects and programmes to promote regional cybersecurity and strengthen the Indo-Pacific region's resistance to ransomware attacks.
The ministers emphasised that cooperation among Indo-Pacific neighbours in the fight against ransomware would prevent ransomware actors in the area from having a safe haven.
According to the joint statement, "Quad will concentrate on results-oriented activities to support partners across the Indo-Pacific to increase their resilience, trust, and confidence in cyberspace, as well as effective incident-response capabilities."
The ministers acknowledged that the multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance will uphold shared values in the design and use of technologies and cyberspace across the region.
The importance of the multi-stakeholder approach for the counter-ransomware capacity building includes promoting the role of existing mechanisms like the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise.
“As a long-term strategy to handle cybercrime more broadly and as a tool to combat ransomware, we applaud the negotiations for a potential new UN cybercrime convention, we stress the requirement that a new convention is established in a flexible and technologically neutral manner that does not define particular technology or criminal investigative techniques," the joint statement said.