UK cyber agency handling four major incidents a week as nation-state attacks surge

Source Domain: therecord.media

Britain’s cybersecurity chief warned Tuesday that the country is handling four nationally significant cyber incidents every week, with the majority now traced back to hostile foreign governments rather than criminal hackers, as the government unveiled a £90 million (about $121.48 million) package to bolster the country’s digital defences.

Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), told the annual CYBERUK conference in Glasgow that while the incident rate had held relatively steady since he first disclosed the figure last October, the origin of those attacks had shifted dramatically.

“The majority of the nationally significant incidents that my teams are handling now originate directly or indirectly from nation states,” said Horne.

China, Russia and Iran were each singled out. Horne described China’s military and intelligence agencies as displaying an “eye-watering level of sophistication,” making Beijing not just a capable adversary but what he called “a peer competitor in cyberspace.”

Russia, he said, was exporting tactics developed on the battlefields of Ukraine and directing them at states it considers hostile, with sustained hybrid activity already detected across the U.K. and Europe.

Earlier this month, the NCSC published a technical advisory warning that Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency has been compromising home and small office routers to redirect internet traffic through servers under their control, enabling them to intercept credentials and map networks for further targeting.

Iran was accused of using cyber operations to target British individuals on U.K. soil who are seen as threats to the regime. In March, following U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, the NCSC said British organizations were at a heightened risk of indirect cyber threats, particularly for those with a presence or supply chains in the Middle East.

Security Minister Dan Jarvis used the same stage in…

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