Britain Needs A Cyber Army To Defend Against Prolific Attacks
Britain will be wide-open to state-sponsored hacking of its critical infrastructure, including its energy supply, for the next decade because of a shortage of 50,000 cyber-security specialists, a top Nato adviser has warned.
Prof Paul Theron, a member of Nato’s cyber-security research group and an advisor to the European Commission, said Britain urgently needed to bolster its defences against what he called a now “constant” barrage of sophisticated attacks from state-sponsored and criminal organisations against power stations, electricity networks and other essential systems.
The remarks come as fresh details of a Russian attack on the UK National Grid on June 8, 2017, the day of the general election, have been published.
“All countries are struggling to recruit cyber specialists and... that hurts our economy,” he said, adding that the tempo of attacks had sharply increased.
“It’s every day. You see these attacks happen all the time. There is probably not one single day that there are not these kind of attacks.”
Prof Theron, the former head of cyber-resilience at Thales, one of France’s biggest defence companies, now lectures at Cranfield University. He said Britain remained highly vulnerable because much of its industrial infrastructure was designed and built in the Seventies and Eighties in an era before cyber-security was a concern.
“To change the level of cyber-security of industrial installations like electricity distribution takes time,” he said. “It’s [a] long-term problem. It’s going to take another 10 years before things really improve.”
The Russian cyber-attack on election day was part of a pattern of assaults which prompted Ofgem, the industry watchdog, to a month ago announce a new funding package worth £96 million to beef up physical and cyber resilience at National Grid and other energy companies.
National Grid said: “Since 2013, significant changes have occurred in the security environment…. Cyber-attacks have made a step change from causing disruption, to being designed to cause major widespread sabotage and destruction.”
Prof Theron said small industrial devices found in power stations, electricity and gas distribution networks had left them highly exposed to cyber-warfare, especially as legacy systems were connected to types of software accessible on the Internet.
Russia also tried to Hack BT
Ciaran Martin, director of cyber security at GCHQ, said the Kremlin-backed hackers also tried to take out telecoms companies such as BT. They are already believed to have successfully targeted media organisations and brought down websites with denial of service attacks. Mr Martin will confirm the cyber-attacks, which were designed to bring chaos to across the country.
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