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Ruth Edwards is the Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe and a former Assistant Government Whip. Before being elected she worked in the cyber security industry, most recently as a member of BT’s Security business.
‘China Hacked Ministry of Defence’, ‘How a fraud spree fleecing Britons became ‘a national security threat’, ‘NHS data stolen in cyber attack published on dark web’. That’s about 12 hours-worth of news headlines. All of them related to cyber crime and cyber espionage. Whether it’s protecting our national security or fighting crime, the new frontline is online.
Yet interestingly, it’s an issue rarely raised with government ministers by the media or with MPs by constituents. People are very concerned with police officers being visible on foot patrols, the size of our armed forces, and flagship military hardware. All of these things are hugely important, ministers are rightly held to account for them.
But rarely are they scrutinised in the same way about our nation’s cyber defences, plans to tackle online scams, or our response to hostile actions in cyberspace, either by nation states or hacking groups affiliated to them.
Last week, the Secretary of State for Defence gave a statement to Parliament on the hacking of a contractor’s system that held payroll and other personal details of military personnel. Although it is being reported that China is believed to be behind the attack, the Government will not (at the time of writing) confirm this or name the state.
This is very unusual; last year, the Government called out China for its role in a cyber attack against the Electoral Commission and its targeting of a number of members of parliament. This builds on a precedent set in 2021, when the UK and US jointly called out the involvement of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in the Solar Winds cyber attack.
I will be interested to hear what the reason for today’s silence is. Although there may be good reasons for withholding such information in certain cases, in general I think we should be calling out the behaviour of nation states online as well as offline. It is unthinkable that we wouldn’t do so if there had been a physical attack on our armed forces.
There is a reason for the rise of states using the cyber domain to carry out covert operations and damage critical national infrastructure: the cost, financially and to their reputation, is much lower. It’s the same with cyber crime; that’s why as other types of crime have fallen, online fraud has risen.
The online environment has enabled states, or groups of hackers affiliated to them, to carry out hostile actions that damage our interests and those of our allies, but fall short of a declaration of war.
Of course, this has always happened, but I would wager our increased reliance on cyberspace has enabled it to happen at a much higher rate than before. We need a new way to tackle such hostilities. We need to agree what tools we will use to retaliate for such acts and raise the cost of carrying them out, thereby increasing deterrence.
Online is also the new frontline of another important challenge: supply chain security. Our economy, and much of our critical national infrastructure, is powered by advanced semi-conductors – and our supply chains for them are vulnerable.
We saw in the pandemic how a shutdown for a few key factories in East Asia wreaked havoc on industries across the world. Likewise, the global supply chain for critical minerals, some of which (like gallium) are used in chip manufacture, is opaque. The vast majority of the extraction and processing of many of these materials is concentrated in China.
Now, you can argue over whether China is a systemic threat or competitor to the United Kingdom, but the fact we need to urgently address where and how we secure our critical minerals is a no brainer. We need to de-risk our relationship with China; we can’t be reliant on it for such crucial materials.
Britain is already building international partnerships to diversify and secure our supply chains of both semiconductors and critical minerals. These efforts should be given the same importance as military alliances. Without these materials, the country won’t function.
Finally, the internet has become the highway of disinformation and information warfare. For example, there is evidence of Russian bots working to stir up divisions and polarise the debate around vaccines in the US- years before Covid-19.
The web of social media accounts linked to propaganda for nation states is staggering. Some are crude and obvious, others more subtle. The algorithms that push tailored content to users on many social media sites make it easier for people to fall prey to disinformation and conspiracy theories. The rise in the latter being quoted to me as gospel – with no evidence to support them – is disturbing.
We need to work with experts in psychology and information warfare to look at how we can best encourage people to evaluate and verify the information they see online. We also need to look at how we can make our population more resilient against disinformation campaigns.
By this I don’t mean we should snuff out different opinions, or views that go against what is accepted as the cultural norm. I mean that the most commonly used internet platforms are designed as large echo chambers, which constantly pump related content and opinions to their users.
Comedy dog videos and gardening tips are one thing; who doesn’t want regular videos of Labradors dressed as Dobby the House Elf? But, imagine for a moment how they could be used by a hostile actor seeking to cause us harm.
It’s easy to think it won’t happen. It’s difficult to imagine the impact that the above scenarios, such as a shortage of semiconductors or critical minerals, would have. It’s tempting to put them in the clickbait, “interesting article but very unlikely to actually happen” category. So I’ll leave you with just one more thought.
If you’d read an article in December 2019 that said that, within months, the country would be in lockdown as a deadly virus raged round the world, would you have believed it? Or would you think the author had been on the Christmas sherry? We should always hope for the best but prepare for the worst. We need to scale up our efforts to defend against cybergeddon.
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