Industry | 2010.03.07
Britain fends off flood of foreign cyber-attacks
Government and business computers regularly targeted by hackers, says security minister
Foreign states and terrorist groups are regularly launching cyber-attacks on the UK\'s computer systems with the potential to cause widespread damage, according to the government\'s security tsar.
Lord West of Spithead, who is parliamentary under-secretary for security and counter-terrorism, told the Observer that the UK was under daily cyber attack, often from agencies working on behalf of foreign governments.
He said there had been "300 significant attacks" on the government\'s core computer networks in the last year and warned of chaotic scenes if one successfully targeted infrastructure such as the UK\'s communications systems.
The security service, MI5, has warned that tackling espionage conducted by Chinese and Russian agents is taking up an increasing amount of its time.
West declined to identify the states carrying out the cyber-attacks on UK computer systems, but it is clear that he shares the service\'s fears that some states are using communications systems and computer networks to seek confidential information held by government agencies and private companies in the UK.
"There is no doubt some state actors have sucked out huge amounts of intellectual copyright, designs to whole aero engines, things that have taken years and years of development," West said.
"The moment you mention a particular state, they will deny it," West added. "The problem with cyberspace is that attribution is extremely difficult. It\'s almost impossible to do it in terms of evidence that would be necessary in a court of law."
However, he said the UK government had sufficient intelligence to be confident that it knew who the main perpetrators were. Russia has been widely blamed for launching debilitating cyber-attacks on Estonia and Georgia. West said such actions prompted new questions.
"If I went and bombed a power station in France, that would be an act of war," he said. "If I went on to the net and took out a power station, is that an act of war? One could argue that it was."
And he warned that there might come a time when the UK would feel compelled to retaliate. "If some state sponsor keeps trying to get into your systems, probably for industrial espionage, are you going to go back into their system and bugger it up? We\'re all capable of doing these things. At the moment we wouldn\'t do that, but maybe this is where we need to have discussions."
He suggested that the UK needed to be prepared to tackle a spectrum of threats in cyberspace, including those posed by criminal gangs and terrorists. "I\'m very worried they [terrorists] may start becoming cuter and try to use our connectivity to have a go at our critical infrastructure, things [that control] our services, our food [distribution] and water supply," he said. Terrorists were currently "not brilliant" at attempting this sort of attack on infrastructure, he added, but they would learn fast and "we\'ve got to be ahead of them".
As an example of the potential effects, he talked about what would happen if time signals from global positioning system satellites were disabled. "Not a single cash machine would work, the Docklands Light Railway wouldn\'t work, you wouldn\'t be able to berth oil tankers, great chunks of our transport infrastructure would stop," West said.
He drew comparisons with ice storms in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, several years ago. "All the power went down; there were riots with people smashing into stores," he said.
The government is so concerned at the evolving threats in cyberspace that this month it launched the Office of Cyber Security, which draws on expertise from organisations such as GCHQ, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.
The OCS is engaged in planning exercises looking at warfare in 2015 and 2040. Another part of its remit will be tackling online fraud. West described the rise of "malicious" computer code as "exponential" and "mindboggling". "The more you realise the malicious elements that are out there trying things, the more horrifying it becomes," he said.
Last week Spanish investigators arrested three alleged ringleaders of the so-called "Mariposa" botnet, which had infected and controlled up to 12.7m PCs. West acknowledged that the 2012 Olympics would be a target for cyber-attacks. "People will be trying to get into the Olympics [ticketing] site to see what they can do," he said.
His comments come days after the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, warned that militant groups, foreign states and criminal organisations posed a growing threat to US security as they targeted government and private computer networks. "Apart from the terrorist threat, nation states may use the internet as a means of attack," Mueller said. "They seek our technology, our intelligence, our intellectual property, even our military weapons and strategies."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/201[...]ritain-fends-off-cyber-attacks
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