All the latest UK technology news, reviews and analysis
|
|
|
07 Mar 2010
State-sponsored cyber attacks have escalated to such an extent that the UK may soon be forced to retaliate, according to a report in The Observer today.
Lord West of Spithead, the parliamentary under-secretary for security and counter-terrorism, told the paper that the UK is under daily attack from foreign states and terrorist groups.
He explained that there had been 300 "significant attacks" on core government computer networks in the past year, but that linking some of these to foreign regimes is nigh on impossible owing to the global, borderless and generally lawless nature of the internet.
"There is no doubt that 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. The moment you mention a particular state, they will deny it," he told the paper.
"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."
Attacks on critical infrastructure are garnering more headlines than ever. Security giant McAfee released new research in January showing that attacks on critical infrastructure IT systems are widespread and growing in frequency, and could cost over $6m (£3.7m) a day on average.
However, these attacks are also being taken more seriously. The UK government recently announced a new Office of Cyber Security, while President Obama appointed security veteran Howard Schmidt as his Cyber Security Co-ordinator.
Latest stories from Security
Related articles
Related jobs
Poll
Are you confident that the UK's IT infrastructure is secure from attack in the wake of the Flame malware revelations?
Orange and Intel talk us through the ins and outs of their San Diego smartphone
Connect with V3.co.uk
Social networking is almost ubiquitous. This white paper examines the benefits and risks and it looks at the different ways companies can reconcile them
The importance of understanding your infrastructure
Python Developer / Python Django Team Leader London 55k...
Java Architect / Application Architect London 70k...
SQL Server Developer SQL Server Banking SQL Server...
User Interface Developer / UI Developer / User interface...
Keep up to date with the latest products, services and technologies from the world's leading IT companies. IThound.com brings you over 2,000 white papers, case studies and analyst reports.
Do you agree?
Cyber Security
The issue described in this article is well known, in particular, by threat researchers all over the world that combat against cyber threats on a daily basis. Cyberwar is something real but people cannot see it because it is virtual and non-tangible. An example: a botnet made up of a thousand machines compromised, owned and controlled by cybercriminals, can be defined as an offence and war in all its meaning. It is just a matter of thinking about the potential effect in the real world, represented by thousands of compromised machines. What about a distributed attack against a government system? What about a distributed attack against an important national web-based service made unavailable by hackers? This is war, about which governments must react. Who is responsible? In the first instance, organised hackers, known as cyber criminals. Secondly, every user around the world who has not correctly protected their machine. Hackers use this opportunity to take ownership of unprotected machines and use them as a means to hit government targets. This is the typical methodology used when the target is an important department, agency or governments: use as many machines as possible to create a big potential effect against the target, confusing and removing the tracks of the authors. What to do? Invest in a security-awareness campaign, as already done with the campaign to protect children. Educate the public, corporate, agency and government employees to use computers in the correct way, establishing rules and warnings. Invest into security technology which represents a huge support against data leakage and piracy against fraud online. Rossano Ferraris, CA ISBU Research, Internet Security Intelligence Team
Posted by: Rossano Ferraris 12 Mar 2010