UK: Russian Hacking Reaches New Levels of Hostility | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #hacker

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Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre investigates major attacks at a rate of about four per week, its chief executive Richard Horne told the audience at this year’s 10th annual CyberUK conference, held this year in the Scottish city of Glasgow.

“We do know from conflicts around the world this last year that cyber operations are now integral to conflict, as much a reality of modern warfare as drones and missiles, and the scope of targeting is getting wider,” he said at conference, which the NCSC hosts.

“The attacks on the Polish energy sector in December are a stark reminder of that reality, that cybersecurity is the home front,” he said (see: Wiper Malware Targeting Poland’s Power Grid Tied to Moscow).

“NCSC handled over 200 nationally significant incidents last year, more than double the year before,” said Anne Keast-Butler, director of the Government Communications Headquarters. GCHQ is the nation’s signals intelligence agency, of which NCSC is part.

While the chief cybercrime threat facing British businesses is financially motivated ransomware, Horne said “the majority” of the NCSC-investigated attacks trace to nation-state threat actors. China in particular wields an “eye-watering level of sophistication in their cyber offerings,” which he characterized as being on par with Britain’s capabilities.

The NCSC chief also singled out Russia, noting that it’s been “taking cyber lessons used in the theater of war and moving them beyond the battlefield.”

Horne highlighted the rise of “sustained Russian hybrid activity targeting assets across the U.K. and Europe,” and said Britain’s intelligence and military leaders are racing to study and attempt to better combat these tactics, especially in advance of any hostilities escalating.

“We have a unique window to learn how cyber operations have been used in conflict situations and shore up our resilience at home,” he said.

The British government has previously signaled that it’s closely tracking this threat.

“Russia is testing us in the gray zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war,” often boiling down to “attempts to bully, fear monger and manipulate,” said Blaise Metreweli, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known a MI6, in a rare public speech last December detailing Moscow’s evolving “information warfare” tactics.

These tactics include “cyberattacks on critical infrastructure,” as well as “drones buzzing airports and bases,” aggressive maritime and undersea activity, “state-sponsored arson and sabotage” and a range of “propaganda and influence operations” designed to target existing societal divisions, Metreweli said.

“We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” she said.

Dan Jarvis, Britain’s minister of state for security, echoed those words in a speech at CyberUK. “They’ve worked out that the most effective way is not to confront us directly but to quietly hollow us out,” he said of Russia’s evolving cyber operations playbook.

One challenge for cyber defenders and government agencies is the rapid and disruptive pace of technological change.

Horne said that as technology changes, “the definition of cybersecurity expands with it.” It now encompasses everything from “securing the operational technology that controls energy systems, to production lines, robotics, space-based communications autonomous systems and agents.”

Speakers highlighted how industry and government are racing to understand the risks and opportunities posed by the emergence of frontier artificial intelligence models such as Claude Mythos, which can find vulnerabilities and chain them together into exploits. Officials said open-source models offering similar capabilities could arrive within six months.

Jarvis, Britain’s security minister, said the government is committed to forging much closer ties with frontier AI model developers.

“We will need to build national scale, AI-powered cyber defense capabilities – capabilities that can protect our nation’s most critical networks by autonomously identifying and addressing vulnerabilities at a speed and scale no human can match,” he said.