UK Cyber Chief Warns Country 'Widely Underestimating' Risks From Cyberattacks

The cyber risks facing the United Kingdom are being "widely underestimated," the country's new cyber chief will warn on Tuesday as he launches the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) annual review. From a report: In his first major speech since joining the NCSC -- part of the signals and cyber intelligence agency GCHQ -- Richard Horne will drive a shift in tone in how the cybersecurity agency communicates these risks. Despite some evidence showing cyberattacks growing year-on-year for half a decade, the NCSC has not previously confirmed the trend nor expressed alarm about it.

"What has struck me more forcefully than anything else since taking the helm at the NCSC is the clearly widening gap between the exposure and threat we face, and the defences that are in place to protect us," Horne will say, according to an advance preview of his speech on Tuesday. Citing the intelligence that NCSC has access to as an agency within GCHQ, Horne will warn that "hostile activity in UK cyberspace has increased in frequency, sophistication and intensity," adding that despite growing activity from Russian and Chinese threat actors, the agency believes British society as a whole is failing to appreciate the severity of the risk. The annual review reveals that the agency's incident management team handled a record number of cyber incidents over the past 12 months -- 430 compared to 371 last year -- 89 of which were considered nationally significant incidents.

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[Narcocide]

There's no way he's wrong about that. What's the crowd you think you're playing to here, exactly?

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[ls671]

Yeah he's definitely quite a Sherlock Holmes indeed to have figured it out.

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[Narcocide]

That's hardly the point. It's an irrefutable no-brainer; the UK and many other countries like it, are in fact underestimating cyber threats. It isn't a new situation either.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the Cyber Chief said his job is more important than people thought, what a surprise!

But nevertheless accurate.

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[AmiMoJo]

Just like the pandemic planners thought their jobs were more important than people thought!

Oh wait, turns out they were right.

In the case of the UK I think we just can't deal with stuff like this. Our politicians won't do anything about it, they will just hope it becomes someone else's problem.

GHCQ works for themselves

[FeelGood314]

I had a run in with these arrogant assholes when they pushed a new certificate format for the UK electric meters. This is an arrogant self-serving cronyism organization. I was positive there was a hash collision attack against the certs and they denied it. It was stupid because the fix was just to rearrange the fields back to the way we do the certs in North America. It took me 3 weeks to come up with a simple demonstration. Their response was not to actually admit a mistake and switch the order of the fields back but to add, what they told me, was a random field that an attacker could not predict and therefore prevent the collision attack. Years later I discovered that they never told the Certificate Authorities that the new field, that they called "index", needed to be random.