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Britain’s top cyber general has said the UK possesses the ability to “degrade, disrupt and destroy” the critical infrastructure of its enemies in a future cyber conflict, in a rare recognition of the military’s offensive hacking capabilities. .
General Sir Patrick Sanders, who heads the UK’s strategic command, said Boris Johnson told him to ensure Britain is a “leading full-spectrum cyber power” capable of defending itself and carrying out hacking attacks.
But while the British Army claims to have had an offensive cyber capability for a decade, it has rarely been publicly discussed. Sanders said the military worked “in partnership with GCHQ” to offer “offensive cyber capabilities.”
These could, in theory, Sanders said, “degrade, disrupt and even destroy the critical capabilities and infrastructure of those who would harm us, ranging from strategic to tactical objectives” both in isolation and in conjunction with traditional military force.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s senior assistant, is a fan of military technology and cyber warfare extra spending and is expected to be a key element of the upcoming five-year integrated defense review, which will conclude in November.
One possibility is that the prime minister announces the formal creation of the long-awaited National Cyber Force, led jointly by the military and the GCHQ, although this has previously been interrupted by turf wars between them.
Publicly recognized examples of offensive cyber skirmishes are rare and the UK has been largely reluctant to specify what it considers to be legitimate activity. The hacking was carried out within “strict legal and ethical arrangements,” Sanders said, but gave no example.
Theoretically, degrading or eliminating critical infrastructure could include targeting the communications, telephone, or electrical networks of an enemy country in a war situation, although what was deemed legitimate at other times is less clear.
The UK is understood to have conducted a hacking operation against Isis around 2017 to obtain information on an emerging low-tech armed drone capability operated by the Islamist terror group in Mosul.
The hack gained details on how the drones and attached missiles were purchased and how and where the operators were trained, allowing anti-Isis coalition forces to destroy the capability.
The cyber operations are carried out in part from a control room near Corsham, near Chippenham, the historic site of the secret nuclear bunker that the British government could move to in an emergency.
Every day, Sanders said, the UK military was the target of an average of 60 attacks requiring human involvement or intervention. “If this were an air war, this would be the Blitz, and this [Corsham] it is the center of fight and control of Bentley Priory. “
Perpetrators range from young hackers to hostile states, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea – four of the estimated 60 countries worldwide are now estimated to have developing cyberwarfare capabilities.
In recent months, the UK has accused Russia of trying to steal coronavirus research from labs in Britain, the US and Canada, while concerns persist in intelligence circles that China is actively engaged in a broad range of industrial espionage.
“The binary distinction between war and peace as we have approached it no longer applies,” Sanders said. “Our adversaries are using all means to obtain advantages below the threshold of war and are accumulating advantages insidiously and inevitably.”
