With Russia and China launching regular attacks, UK must start taking cyber defence seriously

Even the Ministry of Defence has faced damaging cyberattacks (Picture: Leon Neal) | Getty Images

“We are living through the most seismic geopolitical shift in modern history.” The warning to be sounded at the annual CyberUK conference in Glasgow today by Dr Richard Horne, head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, is a stark one.

With hostile states like Russia, Iran and China launching regular cyberattacks on the UK, we are currently “in a space between peace and war”, he is expected to say.

"Were we to be in, or near, a conflict situation, the UK would likely face hacktivist attacks at scale, with similar effects and sophistication to the ransomware attacks we see today, but no option to pay a ransom to help recover,” Dr Horne will say. "Defending against that means every organisation embedding cyber security into their corporate mission, ensuring they understand the full extent of risk they face."

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Battle-hardened cyber-tactics

That risk is increasing dramatically with China's intelligence and military agencies displaying “an eye-watering level of sophistication in their cyber operations” and Russia taking cyber-tactics learnt on the battlefield in the Ukraine War and directing them “at states it considers hostile”. The UK needs to develop artificial intelligence to defend itself against AI-powered attacks, Dr Horne will say, while we must also plan for quantum computers that will be able to break commonly used encryption processes.

Much of the justified criticism about Britain’s lack of preparedness for war has focussed on the state of the army, navy and air force. In the UK, we have dined out on the ‘peace dividend’ resulting from the fall of communism too well and for too long. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s repeated statements calling into question the US’s commitment to Nato require a radical and urgent transformation of our military capabilities, in close cooperation with our European allies.

However, if anything, we have been even more complacent about the potential damage that could be done to our economy – vital in any armed conflict – by sustained cyber attacks. The Scotsman has previously called for the establishment of a Ministry of Cyber Defence and there is no time to lose to start treating this issue with the grave seriousness it deserves.