Russia ‘waging a cyber war against our banks, energy and hospitals’
RUSSIA has been launching repeated cyber attacks against Britain’s essential services, a computer security chief revealed.
Ciaran Martin, director of the National Cyber Security Centre, said Moscow’s attempts at hacking into the UK’s critical infrastructure were part of a ‘wider campaign to destabilise’.
Critical infrastructure covers vital systems such as water supplies, electricity and gas networks, hospitals, banks and transport. Mr Martin’s warning came as Jeremy Fleming, head of the government’s GCHQ intelligence agency, made an unprecedented attack on ‘reckless’ Russia.
The Kremlin did not care about ‘putting ordinary lives at risk’, he said, adding that the ‘ tectonic plates’ in the Middle East were moving with the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the dispersal of Islamic State fighters and gangs smuggling migrants.
Mr Martin, speaking at a cyber security event in Manchester, said Kremlin attacks on computer networks were was ‘part of a wider campaign to destabilise’ the UK.
He said: ‘Our critical infrastructure gets hit frequently by Russia and it is not always clear for what purpose.
‘As a government as a whole we want to counter hostile Russian intent towards the democratic system and we have got all sorts of different parts of government working on that.’
At the same conference, Mr Fleming – speaking in public for the first time since he was appointed GCHQ director – pointed the finger at Vladimir Putin over the novichok attack on former KGB double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. He said the nerve agent atrocity ‘demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be, how little the Kremlin cares for the international rulesbased order, how comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk’.
The threat from Moscow was both online and offline, he warned.
‘The Russian government widely uses its cyber capabilities. They’re not playing to the same rules, they’re blurring the boundaries between criminal and state activity.’
There are fears that hostile states are recruiting highly skilled criminal cyber cells to carry out attacks on their enemies but Mr Fleming praised the UK for its response against Russia. Mr Fleming, who was an MI5 officer for two decades, said: ‘The robust response from the UK and from the international community shows the Kremlin that illegal acts have consequences.’
The GCHQ listening post’s expertise on Russia will be in increasing
‘Putting ordinary lives at risk’
demand in coming years, he said. In December, the Chief of Defence Staff warned that Britain was at ‘catastrophic’ risk from Russian submarine drones that can cut underwater communication cables.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach said the Navy was prioritising missions to prevent an attack that could wreak economic chaos.
Last month military intelligence chief General Sir Chris Deverell warned that Russia has developed the capacity to cripple Britain with cyber attacks that could hijack air traffic control systems and even disable air conditioning.
There is ‘no limit’ to President Putin’s methods of attack, he added.
‘What they seek to do is to steal, plant, manipulate, distort, destroy our information. Every single system we have in our lives is in some way controlled by systems that have ones and noughts in them. If you can get them then you can affect us.’