Glasgow, Scotland — most serious cyber attacks The head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) said in a speech on Wednesday that the UK is now being targeted by hostile countries including Russia, Iran and China.
Richard Horne, head of the NCSC, part of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, warned that the UK was undergoing “the most seismic geopolitical shift in modern history”. He said British businesses needed to prepare themselves to defend against cyber attacks as the UK could be targeted “on a large scale” if it became involved in an international conflict.
In recent months, officials in Sweden, Poland, Denmark and Norway have warned that hacker Russia-linked terrorists have targeted their critical infrastructure, including power plants and dams.
Horn said the NCSC currently handles about four “nationally significant” cyber incidents a week and handles criminal activity. such as ransomwareWhile the most common problem remains, the most serious threat comes from cyber attacks carried out directly or indirectly by other states.
Britain’s security minister, Dan Jarvis, said the NCSC handled more than 200 nationally significant incidents last year – more than double the number the previous year. Jarvis and Horn spoke at the CyberUK conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow.
In December, Blaise Metreveli, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, said the world is more dangerous And now more than in decades it is being contested and Britain is being said to be teetering between peace and war.
“Let’s be clear, cyberspace is part of that competition,” Horn said.
China’s intelligence and military agencies “display a surprising level of sophistication in their cyber operations”, he said, while Iran is “almost certainly using cyber activity to support the repression of British individuals on our streets who are seen as a threat to the regime.”
Meanwhile, Moscow is using tactics and techniques learned during its war in Ukraine and “taking them beyond the battlefield”, Horn said, pointing to “continued Russian hybrid activity” targeting the UK and Europe. Companies should learn how cyber operations have been used in conflict situations to increase their resiliency, he said.
Hostile states know that the most effective way to act is “not to confront us directly, but to quietly undermine us,” Jarvis said, for example, by hacking the logistics systems that move goods, or compromising businesses.
he compared Britain’s largest automobile manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover has been cyber attacked. – which hit Britain’s economic growth late last year – with masked criminals turning up at car dealerships, breaking windows, breaking into computers and stealing vehicles from parking lots.
AI is making it easier for adversaries to attack by finding vulnerabilities in systems “faster than any human team can patch them,” Jarvis said. He called on AI companies to work with the UK government to develop special programs to boost Britain’s cyber security.
In the event of conflict, the UK could face large-scale cyber attacks, Horn said, but – unlike ransomware – companies would not be able to recover data and pay for access to systems. For this reason, he said, every organization needs to understand the “full extent” of the risk they face and improve their cyber security before it is too late.
On Friday, Swedish officials said a pro-Russian group linked to Russia’s security and intelligence services was behind it. Cyber attack on a heating plant Last year.
Sweden’s Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin compared events in poland In December, when coordinated cyber attacks hit combined heat and power plants as well as wind and solar farms supplying heat to approximately 500,000 customers. Poland later said that evidence indicated that the hackers were “directly linked to Russian services.” Norwegian officials also warned that a hack would occur in April 2025 water flow affected by dam was linked to Russia while in December Danish authorities said another Attack on water utility company There will be no water left in some houses in 2024.
Four cyber attacks are even more 155 incidents of disruption – including arson, sabotage and espionage – Has been linked to Russia or its proxies by Western officials and tracked by The Associated Press since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Other incidents linked to Russia by European authorities include an attack on German air traffic control, an attempt to gain access to Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to officials and journalists, and attempts by hackers linked to Russian military intelligence to steal users’ sensitive data by exploiting a weakness in some internet routers.
