Slashdot Mirror
UK Announces "Cyber Strategy"
concealment writes "The UK government has announced a 'cyber strategy' outlining its plans to make the UK a safe place to do business online. Not limited to merely defending against attacks, the strategy outlines plans to take aggressive, proactive online action against security threats and criminals. Stricter enforcement of Internet usage restrictions and recruitment of volunteer 'cyber-specials' are also planned."
An interesting bit from the article: "In promising to undertake aggressive, military cyberattacks, the UK will be following in the footsteps of the U.S. and Israel — together the presumed creators of the Stuxnet worm — and China, a nation regularly accused of infiltrating and compromising both private and government organizations to extract information."
My "Cyber Strategy": I put on my robe and wizard hat.
UK governments can't even stop foreign criminals walking through the doors at the airports, nevermind computer viruses with malicious intent coming along the wires. The ministers probably can't even spell "cyberwarfare" never mind understand how to counter it.
And given the record we have of foaming at the mouth histrionic "rights" activists with brains the size of peanuts it wouldn't surprise me if some bunch of right-on swampies start a protest group for the right to existence free of persecution of said viruses and trojans.
"To help establish the necessary skills to do this, the government wants to recruit "cyber-specials." Police forces in the UK already use "Specials"—15,000 part-time police officers, sometimes paid, sometimes not—to augment their numbers."
Don't be scared kids, cyber-things are just overrated...
Wizard hat's off to you, bloodninja
Well, what they mean saying "proactive"? Best way is to get rid of botnets sitting in each Windows PC across the land. How to do that? Kill owners? :)
What are the odds that they dream up a whole bunch of laws to "protect the children" and then local councils use those laws in a totally different context.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2696031/Anti-terrorism-laws-used-to-spy-on-noisy-children.html
Whilst not a news paper - -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1053039/Council-use-anti-terror-laws-spy-binmen-accused-accepting-strawberry-pop-bribe-away-trade-waste.html
and many more examples on Google. I don't think I trust them much.
If you are organizing a cyber division of your military, and one of your first inclinations is to alert the media. your more than likely are going to suck as as an administrator for said cyber division. Either that, or you are just hoping that the mere rumor you have such a division will deter would-be cyber combatants from picking you as a target.
-- how cyber combatants react to such headlines.
For a country with cameras everywhere in the name of public safety, this surprises me not. It's like Orwell wrote the play.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Stricter enforcement of Internet usage restrictions and recruitment of volunteer 'cyber-specials' are also planned."
Three guesses (hint) what that means? I suggest the name "Special TAskforce Security Internet" or STASI, and it will recruit volunteers from the general public to spy on other members of the general public, to make sure they adhere to the Internet "usage restrictions" that are of course necessary to protect the rights holders.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
So far the UK government has managed to do 0% of the things it says it will do, so I fully expect these measures to go precisely nowhere. Of course they'll annouce several monumenatally draconian and ineffective policies that they will later backtrack on before allowing this initiative to fade away.
"Stricter enforcement of Internet usage restrictions"
Somehow that strikes me as fostering an environment hostile to online business.
The plan consists of creation of two new dedicated enforcement units:
1. MAFIA Secirity (MAFIA'S) - a dedicated unit charged with protection of music and movie mafia interests. This will solve the shortcomings of former feeble attempts to protect Megacorps of England from the people of England.
2. Microsoft Windows National Guard - dedicated agents 008 through 9800 will protect Windows security loopholes around the world. License to Kill will be granted indiscriminately to resolve all outstanding security issues, similar to the way Microsoft Security Essentially operates in US.
It's a military attack xor a cyberattack. There is no such thing as "military cyberattack".
I am always amused when Americans claim that filming policemen without their consent then putting it on the Internet for the whole world to see till the end of time is a civil right, but when a camera takes a picture of you that is viewed by at most one policeman (unless there is a warrant), and gets deleted after a few months it's 1984.
I've worked in IT for 20+ years. During that time, the security of systems has plummeted. The behaviour required to run systems with a level of 'hygiene' and appropriate controls has been systemic and eroding. Most businesses I see have most staff running as Admin, on old Windows machinery. And you can include significant chunks of government and elsewhere in the same state.
Spyware, and malware have reached a state where defenses and defensive measures are overwhelmed, beaten, ineffective - and the sheer scale and size of 'IT' structures out runs all efforts unless they are highly controlled environments. The points mooted by the Foreign minister are deeply delusional. The idea that you'd open up your security to try and encircle the shambles that is the real world computational landscape is erroneous.
The engineers get over-ruled by management, and the scale of the failings are the end result.
Most Chinese Government sponsored actors (and others) are able to walk into the greater number of interesting targets, and circumvent the appalling data protection layering - and take what they like.
And in due course, if you want to see the full scale hilarity and complete lack of knowledge in the area, I expect UK ministers to be signing up to deals with
http://www.huawei.com/uk/
in due course. At which point you can take it as read that its business as usual and that nobody who talked about it had any idea about what they are talking about.
Current data systems, and how they are operated from are fundamentally broken, and nobody can fix it as it currently stands. It required whole root and branch rethinking, incluing the idea that software can ship, be sold and be used full of security holes and problems, and the authors can write a license that eradicates all responsibility for it in totality, and the world just goes round building stuff on sand.
We`re all equal
They should also give Harry Pearce the ability to turn off the internet... just in case any more Russian submarines attempt to hack the UKs internet.
Protect MS products with more quality 3rd party AV?
As for letting the GCHQ be seen in public - the UK tried this in the 1990's.
The tracking of EU based crime went very well. All was set for a trial with transcripts from different parts of the EU.
The problem is after the first big public show trial - who of real interest will ever use a mobile or computer in the same sloppy way again?
They pulled back from the trial and the public embraced mobile and net use not really aware of what could be done.
So they can listen to voice prints all they like, look at networks and share with the NSA.
Strange how every UK gov likes to use data collected in a public way only to pull back from their vision of a low crime EU.
They recovered from the Lord Curzon's quotes, the ABC trial, the Brinks Mat bullion robbery trace - the more the GCHQ skill set was seen in public -
the more they risk it going dark again - will they risk a 29 October 1948 "Black Friday" after their next show trial?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Great every time the britts wage a cyber attack they are noble peace loving vigilantes but when some one else does it they are evil criminals. At least with this kind of strategy (alerting the world) they are probably going to get owned by a serious cyber division.
hypocrisy, typo before.
So do you advocate doing nothing? Contrary to what you believe some parts of our security services do work quite well. Of more concern is the apparent declaration of a cyber cold war. I makes me wonder who they intend to target, as presumably there is little point in hacking Chinese companies since they stole all their designs from us in the first place. Actually thinking about it that makes sense, why try to hack your allies for commercial intel when you can hack the Chinese and steal the stuff they already stole from them?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial