An effective cyber defence strategy  

Earlier this week, Labour admitted that there had been ‘300 significant attacks’ on the government’s core computer networks. Lord West, the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Security and Counter Terrorism, also warned of chaos if one attack successfully targeted the UK’s critical infrastructure. But the UK is in fact far more vulnerable than this implies. It is not clear how Labour defines ’significant attack’. We also know that the country lacks the expertise to tell when most systems have been attacked, to determine what an attack was for, or to detect so-called ‘zero-day malware’ which lies dormant until activated. The true scale of the threat is therefore much larger. Every day there are probably hundreds of thousands of actions against the UK’s networks: not only government, but our critical infrastructure and defence and security...