Britain’s critical national infrastructure faces a “real and credible” threat of cyber attack, the head of the UK’s electronic spying agency warned.
In a highly unusual public speech, GCHQ Director Iain Lobban said that Britain’s future economic prosperity depended upon developing effective defences against a cyber assault.
Speaking on Tuesday night to International Institute for Strategic studies, he said that the massive growth of the internet had opened up new vulnerabilities with opportunities for attack by both hostile states and criminals.
While GCHQ is more usually associated with electronic intelligence-gathering, Mr Lobban stressed that it also had a security role, referred to as “information assurance”.
He said that they had already seen “significant disruption” to government computer systems caused by internet “worms” – both those that had been deliberately targeted and others picked up accidentally.
Each month there were more than 20,000 “malicious” emails on government networks, of which 1,000 were deliberately targeted at, while intellectual property theft was taking place on a “massive scale” – some relating to national security.
The increased use of government services online – with the prospect of over £100 billion-a-year in tax and benefits payments being processed online – only added to the security challenge.
ITN