British MPs Warn of 'Fatal' Cyber Warfare Strategy

judgecorp writes "British Members of Parliament have warned that the UK's cyber warfare strategy is getting it wrong. According to a defense committee report, the country's IT security forces are inadequately prepared for a cyber attack, rely too heavily on inadequately protected systems, and do not sufficiently appreciate the difficulty of attributing the source of an attack."

Comments

Also "attribution" does not help when

[Chrisq]

Also "attribution" does not help when your main enemy is Islam. The attackers could be in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, or Wolverhampton.

Re:Also "attribution" does not help when

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have thought corporate espionage was more the main enemy in any sort of "cyber warfare" rather than terrorism.
 
Though I'm sure the Chinese have already stolen everything they need from our primitive network.

Re:Also "attribution" does not help when

[gsnedders]

The largest threat of terrorism to the UK does not come from Islamic extremism: the largest threat remains continuing branches of the IRA. Those damn radicalized Christians!

Re:Also "attribution" does not help when

[Gordonjcp]

On the UK mainland alone, over the past 40 years there have been a couple of hundred attacks by Irish republicans - and that doesn't count attacks by loyalists, which tend not to be on the mainland.

How many attacks by radical Muslims? One, and the people who did it are all dead - the upside of suicide bombings is that people tend to only carry out one.

Re:Also "attribution" does not help when

[PPH]

But that's the character of the Internet. Its not a classical war with front lines, like the last big one. Its more like an insurgency or just plain old criminal activity conducted by the punks on the street corner.

Attribution is fine if your plan is to counter attack some state entity. But it does no good against a criminal organization, terrorist cell or spammer that can dissolve and reorganize at any time.

Re:Apparently, someone just told them about proxie

[ark1]

And they were so happy when they successfully traced the latest attack to user "goatse" at fbi.gov.

You mean Goatse was able to expose their gaping hole?

Standard response

[jbmartin6]

The government's response to the report will be "We will do anything it takes to resolve these issues as long as it doesn't cost anything and our users do not have to change their behavior."

Re:Not to mention horribly behind in networking.

[dkf]

Yes but if the over-the-Internet Consultation is suppose to be free or a minimal charge; you will not find a lot of Doctors doing it. The good thing I guess, is that it would be easy to weed out the Doctors who are in it for the money, verses the Doctors that actually care about their Patients. From my personal experience, a real caring Doctor is a rarity in the USA.

The healthcare system is very different in the US to in the UK. In particular, patients don't (usually) pay doctors to get treated in the UK so there's no incentive for the medics to incompletely treat someone, and there's a part of the system that is genuinely motivated to reduce overall costs and which will therefore invest in preventative medicine. (I won't argue that it's a perfect system though, just less broken in terms of overall cost-effectiveness.)