Cyber ​​attacks present a clear and current danger

London: Britain faces a “real and credible” threat of cyberattacks by hostile states and criminals, and government systems are targeted 1,000 times a month, the head of the spy agency said. UK communications.

Iain Lobban, director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said such attacks threatened Britain’s economic future and added that some countries were already using cyber assaults to put pressure on other countries.

“Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second,” he said in a rare speech released Wednesday.

The Internet has lowered “the access bar to the spy game,” he said, and its expansion has increased the risk of disruption to Britain’s critical infrastructure, such as power plants and power stations. financial services.

Growing threat

“The threat is real and credible,” said Lobban, whose agency GCHQ, a large eavesdropping operation similar to the National Security Agency in the United States, handles operations such as intelligence gathering and code evasion. .

Politicians and spy bosses in Britain and around the world are increasingly warning of the growing cyber threat.

The problem emerged last month when security experts suggested that the Stuxnet computer worm that attacks a widely used industrial system could have been created by a state to attack nuclear facilities in Iran.

“It is true that we have seen the use of cyber techniques by one nation on another to exert diplomatic or economic pressure,” Lobban told the International Institute for Strategic Studies, without giving specific details.

A recent parliamentary report said that the GCHQ had indicated that states such as Russia and China posed the greatest threat of electronic attack against Britain.

The United States is currently setting up a Cyber ​​Command to defend defense networks and stage offensive cyber attacks, and Lobban has said there needs to be agreement on “appropriate standards of behavior for responsible states in cyberspace.” .

He said the worms had already caused significant disruption in UK government systems, with 20,000 malicious emails on the networks each month, 1,000 of which were deliberately targeted.

With £ 100 billion in tax and benefit payments due to be processed online over the next few years, he warned it would be a major challenge for the government to avoid putting personal data at risk or being open to fraud.