A declaration by Britain that it is developing the capability to carry out offensive cyber attacks against other nations has triggered criticism and astonishment among security experts.
Philip Hammond, defence secretary, said ahead of the Conservative party conference in Manchester that the UK was “developing a full spectrum military cyber capability, including a strike capability”. It was the first time any country has made such a sensitive statement in public.
In recent years, defence officials and experts across the globe have assumed that a number of advanced military powers – most notably the US, Israel, Russia, China and the UK – have developed the ability to destroy or sabotage other nations’ internet infrastructure as part of military planning and covert operations.
But while the US has hinted in off-the-record briefings that it possesses such capability, no state has declared up front that it is developing the power to strike at national foes in cyber space.
“Why make plans for a cyber-strike force public now?” said Thomas Rid, reader in the department of war studies at King’s College London. “Such aggressive statements can be counter-productive. Other actors will want to react in kind, making everybody less secure.”
Mr Hammond’s plans include employing hundreds of computer experts as reservists in the armed forces. He believes it is no longer sufficient just to build defences against cyber attacks, and that an offensive capability is needed to strike back against enemies and put cyber alongside land, sea, air and space as a mainstream military activity.
Although the US is widely known to have launched the “Stuxnet worm” that attempted to sabotage the Iranian nuclear programme several years ago, US officials have been careful not to state on the record that they carried out the attack.
Defence experts warned the UK’s public declaration could make it harder to argue against the use by China and Russia of cyber offensive capabilities to carry out espionage against western states.
Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, thought Mr Hammond’s declaration a “highly unusual step” and meant “the UK may risk losing the moral high ground,” but it needed to be viewed in context.
“It is coming on the eve of a political conference, so it may be a kind of political dog whistle,” he said. “It says to the party: I may be gutting our army but I’m spending a lot of money on this other area that is the future of warfare.”
But another leading analyst said the timing of the declaration – against the background of controversy over leaks by Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency contractor – was strange.
“We’re living through a period where the security services and GCHQ [the government listening post] are under huge pressure regarding allegations of their surveillance of citizens in the US and Europe,” said the analyst.
“That has given China a chance to defend itself against arguments that Beijing is conducting massive cyber espionage against the west. It doesn’t really make sense for the British [Ministry of Defence] to come out and make a statement like this and give the Chinese yet more ammunition. I wonder how GCHQ and the Foreign Office view this.”
Financial Times
