A chilling reminder that no one’s safe from the goons in Moscow and Beijing
BRITAIN’S electronic spy agency, GCHQ, has enjoyed an unrivalled reputation as the pioneer of code-breaking since the days of Alan Turing in the Second World War. But today’s revelation in The Mail on Sunday that Liz Truss – a former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister – had her phone hacked, possibly by Russia, is a stark reminder of just how vulnerable we are.
Britain’s success in hacking other world leaders’ plotting must not blind us to the skills of our rivals, or their ruthless targeting of our own institutions and those who run them.
Moscow has long sought to steal our secrets. Now we are in a proxy war over Ukraine, its efforts have intensified.
Vladimir Putin’s spymasters are targeting Whitehall just as much as Kyiv. Finding out what our leaders are discussing and what information they share with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is a key goal. And it might seem less immediate, but we are also in a proxy war with China.
This is a state that we know to be adept at stealing military and commercial information – and which is determined to spread its malignant tentacles around the globe.
How much of Putin’s information will be passed to China’s President Xi, without whose tacit support, there could have been no invasion of Ukraine? For both of these antagonists, the battleground is digital, and both have invested in spooks who specialise in artificial intelligence.
Armies of well-trained hackers are at work. Bunkers have been filled with the fastest computers scrolling through the whole world’s electronic data to snatch key information out of zillions of gigabytes, scrutinising the entire digi-universe to pick out vulnerabilities. Careless WhatsApping costs lives, or reputations at the very least.
Putin has long been an expert in using ‘kompromat’ to discredit his domestic rivals with any juicy scandal his agents might uncover through bugged phone calls and illicitly obtained video.
Maybe the very success of GCHQ has made our own leaders complacent about what juicy targets for cyber-warfare they themselves now offer. But the theft of Ms Truss’s data should shake up the rest of us as well. We have been sleeping. How many of us truly pay attention to digital security?
It is a time-consuming bore. But it matters. The truth is, nothing digital is hack-proof. Nothing at all.
Putin knows this very well, which is why he is personally reluctant to use a laptop or mobile phone.
He knows how easily communications can be intercepted.
It is time for voters and politicians alike to acknowledge that our faith in the breakneck progress of artificial intelligence is naive. So far from making us safer, it is threatening our security.
Then there is the human factor. Would we be surprised if ambitious politicians were the sort of people to assume that tedious security rules are for the lower ranks? I, for one, would not. As the Russians themselves say: ‘The fish rots from the head down.’