U.K. fully prepared to take on cyber rogues

In these days of high-tech warfare, nuclear weapons, while still a potential threat, seem almost like a relic of the past. The biggest threat any country now faces is not from the skies, but from faceless groups of hackers who have enough resources to bring down a nation’s defense grid, rendering it powerless against enemy attack.

But one person is not going to take this lying down. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Britain would make full use of the web to take down enemies who wish to damage the country’s infrastructure and businesses. He assured his countrymen that Britain has pumped an additional 650 million pounds into creating a more robust cyber defense network.

How seriously the U.K. government is taking this threat can be gauged from the fact that in 2010, it published its National Security Strategy, which listed cyberspace as priority number one; this simply means that it ranks the threat of an Internet attack on the nation higher over chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Mr. Hague said that the U.K. would try to prevent the arms race on the Internet from spiraling out of control. He expressed concerns that with the growing influence of the web, it would be a free-for-all amongst the rogue powers and the threat of a cyber attack could never be fully ruled out. The U.K. is fully prepared to defend its national security, infrastructure, and government computer systems. Considering the growing seriousness of the situation and in light of the news that the U.S. had considered using cyber attacks against Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, it seems the right thing to do.

Of course, the Foreign Secretary was quick to point out that the country’s defense department would have to be very careful in planning such an attack. The biggest problem was if an innocent party was attacked; in a full-scale cyber attack on another nation, you cannot really pinpoint from where the attack originated and this makes it especially dangerous.

Mr. Hague made the comments after a newspaper report expressed concern over the preparedness of the U.K.’s cyber division in preventing a cyber attack from a foreign power.