NORTH KOREA TARGETS UK FOR MORE CYBER ATTACKS
Expert fears new attempts to cripple British systems
NORTH Korea will inflict “collateral damage” on Britain in 2018, the UK’s ex-cyber spy chief has warned.
The rogue state has previously been blamed for the WannaCry ransomware attack that crippled the NHS in May. Last month, UK ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Security Minister Ben Wallace publicly blamed Kim Jong-un for the attack.
But Robert Hannigan, ex-director of GCHQ, predicted a “greater scale of attacks” on the UK next year. Speaking at a cyber- security summit in London last week, Hannigan said: “WannaCry was a reasonably sophisticated tool, used rather ineptly.
“They will learn from that. We’ll see more ransomware, we’ll see a greater scale of attacks.”
The WannaCry attack led to the cancellation of 20,000 medical appointments or treatments when staff at 81 hospitals were locked out of their computers.
Pyongyang has been widely blamed for the May cyber attack in security circles, and Wallace said: “North Korea was the state that we believe was involved this worldwide attack.”