Image credit: Andrew Milligan – PA Images
The Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt visited Glasgow University’s cybersecurity group, run by RITICS-funded Professor Chris Johnson.
He met Chris, and viewed a demo by Marco Cook, one of Chris’s PhD students. Marco ran an attack demo as Jeremy watched, overloading the input queue on the Allan Bradley PanelView controller. All the rest of the kit was hidden from cameras.
Jeremy tweeted: “Great to be at @UofGlasgow this morning – an institution that’s been changing the world since 1451. I’m visiting their school of computing to discuss why we need a new doctrine of deterrence to stop malign cyber activity.
The visit was reported across the British media, including BBC News and the Belfast Telegraph:
Also as part of his visit to the University, he gave a speech entitled “Deterrence in the Cyber Age.”
In this speech, he said that cyber-attacks could turn elections into “tainted exercises” that undermine Western democracies. But he stressed there was no evidence of successful interference in UK polls. He added that the government was expanding its network of “cyber attaches” – diplomats working with governments around the world to address the problem.
He spoke of his idea of a doctrine of deterrence that should involve making states pay a “price” for carrying out malicious cyber activity.