UK infrastructure faces cyber attack threat, says GCHQ chief
The UK's critical infrastructure faces a 'real and credible' threat of cyber attack, the head of GCHQ, Iain Lobban, says.
Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London on 12 October 2010, Mr Lobban said he did not want to go into detail about the threat to the UK's critical national infrastructure.
But he said the threat posed by terrorists, organised criminals and hostile foreign governments was 'real and credible' and he sought a swifter response to match the speed with which 'cyber events' happened.
With both the Strategic Defence and Security Review and the Comprehensive Spending Review due to be published next week, Mr Lobban said ministers would be looking at what capabilities the UK needs to develop further.
'Clearly they will also be deciding how they trade off against other spending priorities.'
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'.
Each month there were more than 20,000 malicious e-mails on government networks, of which 1,000 were deliberately targeted at them, while intellectual property theft was taking place on a 'massive scale' - some relating to national security.
And there was a 'big challenge' with the government wanting to get more and more services online, he said.
'Cyberspace lowers the bar for entry to the espionage game, both for states and for criminal actors,' he said.
While 80% of the threat to government systems could be dealt with through good information assurance practice - such as keeping security patches up to date - the remaining 20% was more complex and could not simply be solved by building 'higher and higher' security walls.
ABOUT GCHQ: GCHQ is probably best known for its foreign intelligence mission, providing Signals Intelligence or ‘Sigint’. Its current contributions support a wide range of national security activity including:
- support to the military in Afghanistan and more broadly;
- counter-terrorism, supporting Security Service investigations and working with the Secret Intelligence Service to understand the upstream threat;
- counter-proliferation;
- tackling serious and organised crime; and
- a range of other global security issues.
Related Links:
Full PDF of Iain Lobban's speech to IISS: Download PDF here
GCHQ website http://www.gchq.gov.uk
International Institute for Strategic Studies website http://www.iiss.org/