Re: I Struggle

"I Struggle.. to work out what's actually wrong with this initiative."

What's wrong is that the starting point is wrong, in an assumption by government that all (or a lot of) our critical infrastructure is cobbled on to the internet with no more security than a password of "password", and a user ID of "admin". I'm sure there's more than a few instances of dodgy security, but the implied threat is largely fictitious, like most of the things government work bravely and tirelessly to save us from.

However, to appoint BAe (involved in every major defence overspend and procurement failure in the past forty years) to give advice on this is not going to end well. The consultants will undoubtedly come up with a series of recommendations with a high cost, to be paid by you through your utility bills, but in reality offering no material advantage to your security.

All of this "cyber security" claptrap is being parroted by a government that has virtually no IT or science expertise amongst its MPs (or civil servants, if we judge by results), and you can be sure that BIS or whoever will have drawn a narrow remit that precludes any bigger picture application of common sense. So you might feel happy that the electricity companies are going to be paying for BAe's expertise, but what do you think National Grid's IT bods have been doing all these years? Even then, the physical threat remains, so that you could for example bring down the power grid to the entire south east of England with a handful of well placed devices, and in a manner that would take weeks to resolve.

We certainly do need to keep in mind the threat of systems intrusion and electronic attack, but the limited success of Stuxnet with the backing of the largest and smartest world technology power, and the delivery by the world's most effective spying, intelligence and sabotage power (Israel) shows that the whole cyber warfare risk is over-rated.