The number of 'highly covert and targeted' cyber warfare attacks against defence and national security organisations around the world cannot be estimated, according to a wholly-owned subsidiary of BAE Systems.
Speaking at DSEi on 15 September, Henry Harrison, technical director at Detica, said the point of a covert attack was to evade detection. Acknowledging the 'Stuxnet Incident' which he said was 'widely believed' to have comprised an effort to cause disruption to uranium centrifuges in Iran, Harrison admitted: 'We don't know how many more [attacks] there have been.'
Highlighting the wide array of cyber attacks, which can range from visible to covert missions, Harrison described attackers' objectives to disrupt, manipulate and thieve information. 'These are the things you might want to do in cyber space,' he said.
Highly covert targeted attacks, he continued, comprised military attack, hacktivism, extortion, terrorism and cyber espionage - the last of which he described as being 'rife' and 'less reported'.
A small number of reported incidents is blamed on the 'Targeted Attack Iceberg' which comprises reported, unreported and undetected incidents.
'Cyber espionage may be more significant than you may be aware of. Defence and national security organisations around the world are affected by this. What is really significant is that the problem has grown,' Harrison continued.
Referring to the UK's National Security Strategy which highlighted cyber as one of four 'tier one' risks to the country and designated some £650m to the cause, he urged: There is real recognition from the government that cyber security is no longer the preserve of geeks and information technology specialists.'
The airborne three-domain, the two ground-based and the ¼ ATR OpenVPX-based cross-domain systems were engineered to provide real-time security across multi-domain operations.
DARPA’s Mission-Integrated Network Control (MINC) programme was set up to develop an autonomous tactical network and enable critical data flow in contested environments.
Why space is an essential part of modern military capabilities
Defence-secure mixed reality headsets can save hours, or even weeks, of travel time to fix defunct equipment or get subject experts effectively “on-site” where they are needed.
The Joint Counter Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Device Electronic Warfare (JCREW) counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED) and Drone Restricted Access Using Known Electromagnetic Warfare (DRAKE) counter-UAS (CUAS) systems are mounted and dismounted RF jammers.
Adarga’s Vantage information analysis tool is in service with the UK MoD and individual UK forces. It builds on the company’s Knowledge Platform which processes, organises and analyses open source material, as well as information held by the user’s military, security and intelligence services.
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