Ransomware is the cyber threat facing the UK, the chief of the UK’s official National Cyber Security Centre Lindy Cameron, has told a virtual audience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank’s second annual security lecture. Having become NCSC chief last autumn, she’s the second woman to give the lecture as the first last year was Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick.
She said that she was not most worried about state actors, or ‘cyber armageddon’: “What I worry most about is the cumulative effect of a potential failure to manage cyber risk and the failure to take the threat of cyber criminality seriously. For the vast majority of UK citizens and businesses, and indeed for the vast majority of critical national infrastructure providers and government service providers, the primary threat is not state actors but cyber criminals, and in particular the threat of ransomware.”
As examples she gave the 2017 disruption of the NHS by WannaCry malware, and similar cases that have prevented students accessing classes, and shut some local government services. She likened response to a ransomware incident to a fire – after the house has burned. “The effect of ransomware on an unprepared business is brutal. Everything is taken out. Files are encrypted. Servers go down. Digital phonelines no longer function. Everything comes to a halt and your business stops in its tracks.
“Some of the most powerful testimonies I’ve heard since starting this job have been from chief executives faced with a ransomware attack they were under-prepared for.”
She offered the NCSC’s ten steps to cyber security, as advice to computer users; and further detailed a ‘national toolkit and a whole of nation approach’. She stressed that ‘a whole-of-society approach to improving the cyber resilience of the UK’ listing industry, academia, and civil society as having a role to play. She concluded: “This really does feel like the moment when the world starts to take cyber security seriously, as a national security issue and a public policy issue.”
Earlier, pointing to the recent summit of the G7 nations hosted by PM Boris Johnson at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, she said that international consensus on ‘cyber security as a mainstream national security issue’ is building. She noted also how the incoming Biden administration has taken up cyber [more in the July 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine], and that one of Biden’s first national security challenges was the response to the SolarWinds intrusion, in December.
She stressed cyber as also a ‘mainstream public policy issue’. While she singled out China, Russia, North Korea and Iran for their ‘state sponsored cyber activity’ and said that it ‘represents one of the most malicious strategic threats to the UK’s national interests’, she said that it is not the only threat. “And if we treated it as such, we would misrepresent the totality of the challenge and run the risk of an inappropriate response. Firstly because we all know that looking at a conflict solely through the lens of the protagonists would be to miss the inevitable opportunistic criminals exploiting the black market. And secondly because cyberspace is – primarily – a peaceful domain, of prosperity and opportunity.”
Not only governments are at risk from cyber espionage, as ‘nation state espionage groups’ may seek to learn of government policy from think tanks (such as RUSI), and commercially sensitive information.
Although the threat has grown, the UK’s investment in cyber security means we know more about these threats now than we did five years ago when the NCSC was set up, she said. “And our world leading systems for sharing information with trusted partners means we can use this to improve the resilience of businesses and civil society, not just government and critical national infrastructure. Our ability to do this is the envy of many.”
For more visit the NCSC website or the RUSI website.
