Russian attacks on UK cyberinfrastructure will be ‘feature of our life’, former MI6 chief warns

Russian attacks on UK cyberinfrastructure will be a “feature of our life”, a former head of MI6 has warned.

Sir Alex Younger said that while Russian spies have been “cleared out of Europe”, things such as undersea internet cables and other critical national infrastructure could be targets.

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Speaking on The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim Podcast, he said: “We have highly powerful security services across our alliances.

“We can deal with this stuff, but I worry that it’s so unfamiliar, it’s so different to the world we were brought up in that it’s going to take a really significant degree of adjustment.”

Sir Alex said such incidents are “going to be a feature of our life”.

On the subject of undersea cables, he said the UK sits at the junction of the world’s internet infrastructure and that these cables are “unprotected”.

“Russia has a documented program… to find those cables and cut them. It’s such a simple thing. It’s easy to do. We can’t defend them.”

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The vulnerability of undersea cables that modern society relies upon was thrown into the spotlight last week, when two such cables were damaged in the Baltic Sea where a China-flagged vessel had been sighted.

Sweden has formally asked Beijing to help clarify what happened in that incident.