State-sponsored cybercrime on “industrial scale” says MI5 chief

The Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, has given a speech discussing the growth of organised cybercrime targeting UK businesses and government.

In a rare public speech, the head of the British Secret Service described how “one major London listed company” estimated that it had lost “some £800m as a result of hostile state cyber attack – not just through intellectual property loss but also from commercial disadvantage in contractual negotiations.”

The MI5 chief described the extent of the problem as “astonishing – with industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state sponsored cyber espionage and organised cybercrime”, and called upon the private sector and government to improve its information-sharing about cyber attacks.

I presume Jonathan Evans meant “astonishing” to the man in the street, and not to…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.