BAE warns UK government on cyber security | Nicosia Business ...

BAE Systems, Europe?s biggest defence contractor, says the government is not doing enough to help businesses protect themselves from the growing threat of cyberattacks.

Six months after the release of the government?s cyber security strategy, in which it pledged to foster greater engagement with British businesses suffering from the growing risk of cyberattacks, few businesses are engaging with government and others are wary of doing so because they believe it could be a wasted effort.

A quarter of the companies polled in a survey by Detica, BAE?s cyber business, said they were engaging with the government. For many of those that wanted to engage, the biggest obstacle was that executives had yet to be convinced the effort would be worthwhile.

Given that 84 per cent of those polled said cyberattacks would increase and a third said an attack would cost their company more than ?50m, it appears the government has yet to prove itself in the fight against cybercrime, according to the survey.

?Our research indicates that business is showing a surprising willingness to engage and the onus therefore appears to be on the government to enhance understanding of the problem by demonstrating the vulnerability of UK businesses to the cyber threat,? the survey concluded.

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Such engagement is particularly important given businesses ?curious confidence? that their companies are safe from attack, it said.

The study found that 89 per cent of companies felt ?very? or ?fairly? confident they were well-equipped to prevent targeted cyberattacks.

It is a level of confidence far beyond that of the UK government and cyber security experts who say most businesses are woefully ill-prepared to defend themselves.

Baroness Neville-Jones, UK government special representative to business on cyber security, said in a speech in February: ?There is a vast swath of corporates who have valuable intellectual property, much more valuable than they understand, which is inadequately protected. They don?t even realise it has been stolen. They don?t even know they have been the subject of attack. They usually have to be told about it by a third party, most of them do not discover it for themselves. The level of awareness is nothing like it needs to be. This is a very, very serious state of affairs.?

Jim Murphy, shadow defence secretary, said on Tuesday that the government should launch an advertising campaign to raise awareness about the cyber threat and that businesses should be ?kitemarked? on the robustness of their computer systems.

He said it was ?not an exaggeration to say that the emergence of cyberspace is among the biggest changes in human history?, adding that cyber security could be the ?arms race of the 21st century?.

This Detica report, conducted by Ipsos Mori, the pollster, was based on 100 online interviews with strategic and IT decision makers at UK private sector companies with turnover of at least ?350m.

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