Britain's National Security Threatened By 188 High-Level Cyber Attacks In Last Three Months Alone

This is just the start...

Britain’s national security was threatened 188 times by cyber attacks in just the last three months.

The revelation comes from an exclusive interview with Ciaran Martin, chief executive of the newly-created National Cyber Security Centre that appeared in The Sunday Times.

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The National Cyber Security Centre based in Victoria, London.
Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire

Of these hundreds of attacks, the NCSC were investigating both Russian and Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

Mr Martin revealed that these attacks ranged across all governmental departments with hackers trying to gain access to UK government policy on everything from energy to diplomacy.

These attacks included attempts to gain access to high-ranking official’s email accounts, similar to the attack which led to leaked emails from Hillary Clinton appearing in the public domain.

In the interview Mr Martin went on to warn that Russia had drastically increased its aggression within the sphere of cyber activity.

This revelation coincides with some worrying news from Intel Security which claims that UK businesses are drastically behind when it comes to adopting cloud-based systems and the security benefits that come with it.

In the survey that covered 2,000 senior IT professionals, Intel Security found that just 28 per cent of those asked had DevSecOps (development, security, operations) built into their company.

To put that into perspective, the global average is almost double that at 44 per cent.

This cautious behaviour extends to their adoption of the cloud in general.

Of those asked just 7 per cent said all of their data is stored in the public cloud, compared to the global average of 25 per cent.

To try and combat the growing cyber security threat in the UK the government has created the National Cyber Security Centre.

As part of GCHQ, the organisation will work to increase Britain’s ability to defend itself against cyber attacks while increasing the cyber security of major companies who operate within the UK.