Five Things We Didn't Learn From The Russia Report
Any concerns that the long-awaited Russia report would be a damp squib were blown out of the water on Tuesday, when a slew of revelations painted a damning picture of how the UK is dealing with the threat from a hostile foreign power.
The government only “belatedly” realised the kind of threat Russia could pose to democracy and Tory ministers and intelligence agencies have not done enough to mitigate the menace, the 55-page ISC report said.
But there is also a lot we didn’t learn. Including footnotes, there are a grand total of 175 redactions in the report, indicated simply by three asterisks.
Of course there is one inference we can make about all of them – they’re redacted because they’re super juicy and top-secret.
Here are the main ones.
1) What is being targeted by Russian cyber-attackers?
“Russia has also undertaken cyber pre-positioning activity on other nations’ Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has advised that there is *** Russian cyber intrusion into the UK’s CNI – particularly marked in the *** sectors.”
The report notes that Russia has already taken “cyber pre-positioning” into the infrastructure of other countries. This refers to identification of weak points in computer systems that control vital services such as the power grid or communications. These can then be exploited in the event of a conflict causing chaos.
It has previously been reported that the US and Russia are involved in a low-level programme of infiltrating each other’s systems and the report says Russia has already been targeting the UK though it redacts just exactly which sectors – though it’s bad news no matter which ones it is.
The UK has 13 national infrastructure sectors and they’re all crucial – chemicals, civil nuclear communications, defence, emergency services, energy, finance, food, government, health, space, transport and water.
