Hackers will not be deterred by the UK cyber defences, new report warns

The report comes at a time of heightened awareness of online attack following hacking protests against businesses caught in the WikiLeaks controversy. Photo: Corbis

Military "cyber weapon" will be commonplace this century, but it would be unlikely to deter attacks by "hacktivists" and criminal gangs, and could easily be used for State-sponsored cyber attacks instead of the Organization for economic cooperation and development warns.

British authors of the study, which were released today, also caution "explicit lurid language" and lobbying the Government's technology companies distorts plans to protect the United Kingdom against cyber attacks.

Professor Peter Sommer of LSE and Dr. Ian Brown Oxford University internet Institute was commissioned by the OECD for one of a series of studies of potential "future global shocks".

Their report comes at a time of heightened awareness of online attack following hacking protests against businesses caught in the WikiLeaks controversy.

Answers to other hacking attacks from groups inside China and Russia, is military preparations started to gather pace, the study says. But it also warns: "it is not too difficult for nation States to configure discrete cyber attack units. Any agency that researcher for defensive purposes, the nature of cyber-attacks have all the knowledge required to originate attacks and disguise the fact they are doing.

"Little capital investment required … [en] almost all cyber attacks use hijacked, innocent zombie machines."

Brown says State-supported cyberwar will probably be more common because "cyber weapon will play a key role alongside more conventional and psychological attack of nation States in future warfare". However, the report warns: "a predominantly military [reply] to cyber security is a mistake. Most of the targets in the communications, energy, finance, food, Government, health, transport and water critical national infrastructure is in the private sector. Because it is often difficult to be certain who is attacking you from cyberspace, defence of deterrence is not. "

The authors suggest that "lean, just-in-time delivery systems", supplying supermarkets and manufacturers expose them to serious disturbance if large computer network go down.

"More effective is increasing resilience and robustness of critical systems and society in General … Add redundancy to systems allow some service must be continued, while damaged components in isolation, repair and replacement. Public panic buying can quickly enlarge these interruptions. During 2000 the fuel protests in the United Kingdom stores some imported food rationing. "NATO has created a pole of excellence on cyber defence in Estonia, and last year United States appointed its first cyber warfare General.

"UK [created] office of assurance cyber security and information (Ocsia) and a cyber security operations centre. At European level is Enisa, the European network and information security agency, "the report says.

Ocsia has approximately 20 persons working for it, to bring together experts from military, police and intelligence services. It is the lead agency coordinating £ 650 m cyber security program as the coalition Government announced in October last year.

Summer added: "we do not help us by using the ' cyberwar ' to describe espionage or hacktivist block or unreadable by websites, as seen recently in response to WikiLeaks. Nor is it useful to group the trivially avoidable events like virus and fraud with resolute attempt to interfere with the national infrastructure. "

Cyber warfare strategies and weapons include: unauthorized access to systems [hacking], viruses, and worms that spread across the Internet, Trojan horses, distributed denial of service attack that uses botnets, root-kits and use of social engineering.

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