U.K. government: even modest cyber attacks will have "catastrophic" impact on public confidence
U.K. cybersecurity agency says that cyberattack do not have to be massively severe to undermine the public confidence in the government; agency says that government eavesdroppers also face a secret “cyber arms race” to develop quantum cryptography technology
A digital attack against the United Kingdom causing even minor damage would have a “catastrophic” effect on public confidence in the government, the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has privately warned Whitehall.
Growing reliance on the Internet to deliver public services will “quickly reach a point of no return,” meaning “any interruption of broadband access becomes intolerable and will have serious impacts on the economy and public well being”, CSOC says. “A successful cyber attack against public services would have a catastrophic impact on public confidence in the government, even if the actual damage caused by the attack were minimal,” it adds.
Williams writes that the warning forms part of a preliminary “horizon scanning” report produced by the new unit, which is scheduled to begin operations next month. Its job will be to continually monitor internet security, producing intelligence on botnets, denial of service attacks, and other digital threats to national security.
CSOC was established by last summer’s Cyber Security Strategy. With an initial staff of 19 and funded from GCHQ’s budget of hundreds of millions of pounds, it reports to the equally nascent Office of Cyber Security within the Cabinet Office, which coordinates digital national security policy across Whitehall.
“An internationally agreed definition of cyber warfare will remain elusive, with state actors making increasing use of hired criminals and ‘hacktivists’ to carry out deniable cyber attacks on their behalf,” CSOC predicts.
States are likely to increasingly see the cyber domain as an area in which to wage war… it is difficult to see international agreement on what acts are and are not acceptable in a cyber war being achieved within five years…. Even if regulation of this kind was to emerge, it is likely that it would make little difference. The increasing sophistication of criminal cyber tools and the availability of cheap, fast broadband will mean that states are able to achieve their aims by hiring criminal botnets to carry out DDOS or other attacks on their enemies’ infrastructure.
Williams notes that the GCHQ says that government eavesdroppers also face a secret “cyber arms race” to develop quantum cryptography technology. “In the next 5 to 10 years, states are likely to engage in a cyber arms race for quantum cryptanalysis, which would enable the users to crack any encryption within a very short space of time, and for quantum cryptography, which would prevent secure communications from being intercepted,” it said.
Williams writes that “Quantum computers would be able to test every possible cipher for a traditionally encrypted message very quickly. Meanwhile a quantum-encrypted message would be impossible to intercept because just by observing it the eavesdropper would destroy it.”
GCHQ notes though, that “It is unlikely that any state actor will have been able to put quantum systems into operation by 2015, although some state actors may have basic quantum computing capabilities by 2020.”
