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Britain has unveiled its new National Cyber Force, a unit of offensive hackers who can target hostile states such as China and Russia, terrorist groups, and even pedophiles by disrupting their online communications.
The NCF, controlled by the spy agency GCHQ and the Ministry of Defense (MoD), has been operating in secret since April with several hundred hackers based in Cheltenham and other military sites across the country.
Little is known about the agency’s activities, but it is understood that most of its initial operational work has been to disrupt communications from those deemed to pose a threat to the UK, for example terrorists involved in a plan to attack.
Boris Johnson told the Commons on Thursday that the NCF combines “our intelligence agencies and service personnel” and “is already operating in cyberspace against terrorism, organized crime and hostile state activity.”
The idea is to bring together the scattered offensive hacking capabilities that the UK claims to have had for a decade and rapidly increase the size of the operation. The NCF plans to increase its staffing around ten times to 3,000 over the next decade.
An estimated 60 countries have developed offensive hacking capabilities, with Iran and North Korea among the most advanced nations with a history of attacking the UK, as well as state-sponsored hackers linked to intelligence agencies in Moscow and Beijing.
Britain has rarely discussed its offensive hacking capabilities and remains reluctant to do so despite the existence of the new unit. But in 2018, GCHQ said it had carried out “a major offensive cyber campaign” against the Islamic State.
At the time, its director, Jeremy Fleming, said that the operations had made “a significant contribution to the coalition’s efforts to suppress Daesh. [Isis] propaganda, hampered their ability to coordinate attacks and protected coalition forces on the battlefield.
Other techniques used by the NCF include trying to change behavior to make it impossible for threats to continue or deter the person behind the threat from carrying out their plan, or simply downgrading physical communications systems.
Insiders prefer to focus on their work to counter Isis and other terrorist groups, but it is understood that the NCF can work if necessary against Russia or China. He has also been busy disrupting pedophile networks and other online sexual abuse networks, considered to be some of the most sophisticated cyber actors.
Cyber operations will have to be approved by a minister, usually the secretary of foreign affairs or defense, depending on the nature of the target and the exact assets required. Insiders said it would operate within existing legal controls and be subject to oversight by parliament’s intelligence and security committee.
But it is intended to work largely in secret. Its first director, a man, has not been publicly named, but is understood to have been with GCHQ for more than 20 years, often working closely with the Ministry of Defense.
The NCF had been in the planning stage for a couple of years, struggling to get off the ground amid bureaucratic turf wars. Some Whitehall experts have questioned whether the intelligence culture of the GCHQ and the more hierarchical military culture of the Ministry of Defense will work together effectively.
