”Cyberspace is contested” every minute of every day, said Iain...
"Cyberspace is contested” every minute of every day, said Iain Lobban, director of the U.K. intelligence-gathering body Government Communications Headquarters. The government networks receive more than 20,000 malicious e-mails per month, 1,000 of which deliberately target them, he said in…
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a speech Tuesday at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. GCHQ has seen cybertechniques used by one nation against another for economic or diplomatic pressure and massive theft of intellectual property, he said. The government’s strategic defense and security and spending reviews will examine what cybercapabilities Britain needs to develop further and what its priorities are, he said. The government wants to get its services online, but that must be done without jeopardizing people’s privacy and opening up payment systems to fraud, he said. Good information security practices such as keeping patches updated will solve 80 percent of the cyber issues, he said: The remaining 20 percent of the threat is complex, not easily addressed by building security walls higher and higher, and must be fought in cyberspace itself. The “growth of e-crime is disturbing” because it appears to be a low-risk, potentially high-profit avenue for the creative criminal, Lobban said. Tackling it means developing the same kind of holistic approach now used against the drug trade, with strategic intelligence, identification of groups, pursuit of criminals through the courts and making it easier for citizens to report incidents, he said. The potential for cyberattacks against critical national infrastructure “is a real and credible one” that could benefit from real-time information from systems operators as they're being attacked, he said. This points to a different relationship between the national security agencies and key industry players, he said. “Our systems will need to be more interconnected.” Fighting cyberattacks also means renewed international commitments, Lobban said. It’s necessary to reaffirm the proper norms of behavior for responsible countries in cyberspace and what they can expect from each other, he said. It may be possible to use military cybercapabilities as deterrents, he said, “but a casual parallel with nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction is clearly wrong” because small cyberattacks happen every day. Getting cybersecurity right will also allow continuing U.K. economic prosperity, Lobban said.