Straits Times / Singapore Oct 14, 2010 Cyber warfare already here LONDON - COUNTRIES are already using cyber warfare techniques to attack each other and need to be vigilant round the clock to protect computer systems, the head of Britain's communications spy agency says. Iain Lobban, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said British government systems are targeted 1,000 times each month. 'Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second,' he said late Tuesday in a rare speech. His remarks, to a London audience, were published on Wednesday. The internet lowered 'the bar for entry to the espionage game,' he said. Its expansion increased the risk of disruption to infrastructure such as power stations and financial services. 'The threat is a real and credible one,' said Mr Lobban, whose GCHQ agency, a big eavesdropping operation similar to the National Security Agency in the United States, handles operations such as intelligence-gathering and code-busting. The growth of electronic crime was 'disturbing,' costing the British economy billions of pounds, he added. Politicians and spy chiefs in Britain and around the world have increasingly been warning about the growing cyber threat. The issue came to the fore last month when security experts suggested that the Stuxnet computer worm that attacks a widely used industrial system could have been created by a state to attack nuclear facilities in Iran. -- REUTERS
-- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
