CIA chief: UK must beef up its jihadi cyber defences

A forMer CIA director yesterday warned Britain must improve its cyber defences to stop extremists acquiring ‘virtual weapons of mass destruction’.

General David Petraeus, one of the most senior US military commanders post-9/11, said that one day soon there would be a ‘stake through the heart’ of Islamic State’s leader.

But he warned the West could not just play ‘whack a mole’ when it came to defeating the group online and must be ready to stop cyber threats before they appear, as he slapped down web giants for not doing enough to stop terror.

In a speech at the royal United Services Institute think tank in London, the general said: ‘We will defeat the [IS] army. At some point we will put through a stake through the heart of Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State.

‘We are not going to be able to put a stake through the heart of the virtual caliphate.’

Noting that only recently had facebook been persuaded to remove video content of a known terrorist, he added: ‘It is clearly incumbent on social media platforms ... internet service providers and others to take much greater steps to eliminate this.’

General Petraeus said his greatest worry was what extremists could do in cyber space, saying: ‘What keeps an extremist group that gets the cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction from hitting the key?’

He said that such virtual WMDs included the ‘ability to take down the electrical grid of the north eastern United States and keep it down’.

‘I don’t know how you would deter that if they ever got that capability,’ he said.

‘So you’ve clearly got to up the defensive game.’

Asked what the UK needed to focus on, he said Britain must ‘increase the capability again in cyber space, the new battlefield domain, to add to the already very considerable special operations capabilities’.

The UK must also maintain a deployable division and increase elite troop numbers, he added.