In his first public appearance, Iain Lobban, head of GCHQ has revealed that Cyber Terrorists and foreign states launch 1,000 malicious attacks on Britain every month. Revealing his spies have found around 20,000 hostile emails on govt. computer networks.
According to the head of the Cheltenham based intelligence centre has said that cyber attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure are very much a ‘real and credible threat’. This outburst has come as David Cameron has agreed to spend £1billion on cyber warfare capabilities as part of the Strategic Defence Review.
So what does this mean for us regular punters? Well if there was a mass interruption to the public’s access to broadband then the amount we rely on public services that are now available on the internet there would be a massive drop in consumer confidence in the Government. Speaking about the possibility of a successful attack, GCHQ’s new Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) says that a successful cyber attack against public services would have a ‘catastrophic’ impact on public confidence in the government even if the actual damage caused by the attack was minimal.
So really, the impact of a cyber attack on the public would be disastrous, no more Facebook, MSN or Twitter for you ‘average Joe’s’ out there as well as online banking, you can wave bye to that and of the information we have been given now what’s to say that there won’t be directed attacks on our financial infrastructure, that is becoming more and more dependent on the internet and is becoming more ‘online based’.
Should we therefore revert back the ways of old? Keep everything documented and sacrifice the ease of keeping everything online and in folders and files to reduce the likelihood of an online cyber attack and therefore jeopardise our online financial infrastructure.
