In what officials described as a call to arms, national security officials and ministers are urging all organisations, from the smallest businesses to the largest employers, to draw up contingency plans for the eventuality that your IT infrastructure [is] crippled tomorrow and all your screens [go] blank. The NCSC, which is part of GCHQ, said highly sophisticated China, capable and irresponsible Russia, Iran and North Korea were the main state threats, in its annual review published on Tuesday.
Lady Manningham-Buller argued that the situation had changed since the invasion of Ukraine and the various things I read about that the Russians have been doing here sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people and so on. Speaking on a podcast in which she was interviewed by the lord speaker, John McFall, she then referenced Hill, who advised Donald Trump during his first term as US president and co-authored the UK's strategic defence review. I think she may be right in saying we're already at war with Russia. It's a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyber-attacks, the physical attacks, the intelligence work is extensive, she said.
"This was a stealth miner, designed to avoid detection by staying below the radar of both users and security tools," security researcher Himanshu Anand said.
The arrests of two men aged 19, a third aged 17 and a 20-year-old woman were made at their home addresses in London, Staffordshire, and the West Midlands, with support from West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (Rocu) and the East Midlands Special Operations Unit.
