The real enemy

IN THE desperate scramble to rearm before the Second World War, there was always an undercurrent of pessimism. “The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin warned.

In his dark fantasies, destruction and poison gas rained from the skies and obliterated civilisation. That isn’t quite what happened, though the bombers did their best. Today’s equivalent is the feeling that the hacker will always get through, and that attacks on computer networks will become the most devastating form of future warfare.

There are certainly grounds for fear. Technological civilisation is now built on software, much of it desperately insecure. Even when the software itself is secure – and you’d assume that the CIA at least would use properly secured software – the human parts of a bureaucracy can fail, as is shown by the extraordinary case of a teenage hacker, Kane Gamble, operating from his bedroom in Leicestershire, who managed to impersonate the director of the CIA and the deputy director of the FBI and gain access to part of their emails.

States have used propaganda and disinformation to weaken their adversaries for centuries. What is almost entirely new is the use of computer networks for physical sabotage by state actors. Cyberattacks are far more urgent than the spectre of Russian tanks rolling towards underequipped British troops that has been raised. Whatever GCHQ spends deterring or defending against them is better value than the billions on aircraft carriers or Trident.