\u2022\u00a0I\u2019ve seen the state of our weaponry \u2013 helping Ukraine has left us exposed<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Our nuclear weapons are no longer enough to keep us safe<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Not enough people want to die for Britain \u2013 and who can blame them?<\/a>
\u2022 \u2018Little green men\u2019 and ghost fleets: How Russia could drag us into war before 2030<\/a><\/p>\n
There\u2019s a term for a devastating cyber-attack on a broad range of fronts, hitting all the things that make modern life possible, from banking to the water supply: \u201cthe everything, everywhere, all at once attack\u201d. These scenarios sometimes seemed a bit hysterical: the power grid, for example \u2014 the first target in any cyber wargame \u2014 is difficult to hack into. But advances in quantum computing<\/a> and artificial intelligence mean that the everything, everywhere, all at once attack will one day be possible. And Britain isn\u2019t ready. <\/p>\n Quantum computers are astonishingly good at some kinds of calculations. They can make all the many wrong answers to break a code fade away almost at once. Ordinary computers have to check every single possibility one by one \u2013 they would need trillions of years to crack the so-called public key encryption that locks down the internet. In theory, a quantum machine could do it in a few hours, even a few minutes. Public key encryption is used on every secure web page, every time a password or other secret is sent over the internet. Most of our vital systems are networked. Power, water, transport, banking, manufacturing, healthcare: they would all be vulnerable. <\/p>\n Dr Carsten St\u00f6cker is a German scientist and tech entrepreneur whose company, Spherity, makes \u201cpost-quantum\u201d software. He warns that autonomous AI agents<\/a>, using passwords cracked by quantum computers, would be able to carry out attacks on a scale and at a velocity never seen before. Those who wish us harm \u2013 whether nation states like China or Russia, or criminal groups \u2013 would no longer be limited by human speed or even the speed of classical computers. \u201cOur life depends on the internet\u201d he tells me. \u201cThe security of the entire internet will break. This can be an existential crisis.\u201d <\/p>\n II<\/p>\n So, what could an attack look like? <\/p>\n The day begins with a near miss at Heathrow. Two Airbus A380 passenger jets are told to land on the same runway at the same time. They swerve away at the last moment. A red light flashes on the top of the control tower, a message to all planes: \u201cDo not land.\u201d The London Tube grinds to a halt with signals failures across the network. Traffic lights are green at every road junction. Gridlock. Self-driving cars go the wrong way on the motorways. Container ships run aground on the coast. <\/p>\n The UK\u2019s financial system comes under co-ordinated attack. Forged transactions drain accounts. Online banking freezes, so the first sign of trouble for many is when ATMs don\u2019t work. Crypto wallets are emptied and billions of pounds worth of Bitcoin is sold off, sending ripples through financial markets. The London Stock Exchange suspends trading due to \u201ctechnical difficulties\u201d. Panicky emails sent out by the Bank of England turn out to be forged. Sterling crashes. Long queues form outside banks. <\/p>\n Hospitals find that all their patient records have been scrambled or encrypted for ransom. Insulin pumps, pacemakers, and other networked devices fail. Blood bank inventories are corrupted, so transfusion matching is impossible. Surgeries are cancelled and hospitals turn away all but the most critical cases. The computers that hold prescriptions fail: pharmacies can\u2019t dispense medicines. The NHS moves back to paper records. The government appeals for international medical assistance. <\/p>\n At the Sizewell B nuclear power station, safety systems receive conflicting commands<\/a>, sensors give readings that make no sense. They switch to manual control. There are selective blackouts across the power grid, targeting government buildings, the City of London, military bases, and the BBC. Mobile phone networks, especially 5G, go down. The government triggers the Mobile Telecommunication Privileged Access Scheme, giving the emergency services priority. Water treatment plants contaminate the drinking supply. The government tells people to boil their water. <\/p>\n III<\/p>\n The quantum computer that could make all this possible has not yet been invented. Keeping a particle in its quantum state has been compared to balancing a pencil on its tip: one breath of air and it falls. A practical, working quantum computer would have to keep a million pencils balanced and ignore the \u201cnoise\u201d from the ones that fall. Many tech companies are racing to do this. There may also be huge, secret state efforts, led by the militaries or intelligence agencies in China, Russia, and the United States \u2013 even, who knows, in the UK, too. The future will belong to the country that gets the first powerful quantum computer. <\/p>\n \u201cQ-Day\u201d, as it\u2019s known, will come when a quantum computer is big enough and stable enough to run the algorithms that can break today\u2019s internet ciphers. Britain\u2019s National Cyber Security Centre, the NCSC, is charged with protecting us against what could happen next. The NCSC already has its hands full with conventional cyber-attacks. <\/p>\n Inside the crystalline green glass fortress that is its headquarters in London, there\u2019s serious concern about the \u201cintensifying\u201d nature of these conventional cyber threats. The attack on Jaguar Land Rover earlier this year<\/a> was the most economically damaging hack in British history. It cost almost \u00a32bn, according to some estimates. <\/p>\n There were also attacks on M&S and the Co-op earlier this year, which cost hundreds of millions of pounds and left supermarket shelves empty. This could be criminal groups holding companies to ransom, rather than nation-states. But a nation-state could use the same techniques to wreak havoc in supply chains for everything from petrol to food. <\/p>\n A source who worked on one of Britain\u2019s secret cyberwarfare programs told me Russia was behind many of these attacks. The Russian intelligence services were using the country\u2019s sophisticated mafiya in a campaign to undermine Western economies. The strategy was to make Russia strong by making everybody else weak, he said. In that sense, we are already fighting a cyber-war<\/a>. <\/p>\n Most of what\u2019s described as Britain\u2019s critical national infrastructure is in the hands of private companies. Many aren\u2019t protecting themselves properly. British business can be notoriously short-term. Boards focus on profits over the next six months. A senior official told me: \u201cThere is a widening gap between the threat and the ability to defend against it.\u201d <\/p>\n And that\u2019s before quantum computing \u201crevolutionises\u201d the technological landscape, as the official put it. There is a solution: ciphers that even a quantum machine cannot break. <\/p>\n The NCSC has published a timetable for \u201ckey sectors\u201d of the economy to adopt what\u2019s called quantum-resistant encryption. This plan calls for the next two years to be used to identify vulnerabilities; from 2028, \u201cpost-quantum cryptography\u201d should be put into the most important systems; anything else needing a secure connection to the internet should switch over from 2031 to 2035. In this way, the experts at the NCSC hope that Q-Day will be like the Y2K bug \u2013 remember that? \u2013 not a digital apocalypse. <\/p>\n Dr Chris Erven says this ten-year timetable should be five years or less. He is a former lecturer in quantum computing at Bristol University whose company, KETS, makes chips designed to have unbreakable encryption. BT is testing them in its exchanges now. Dr Erven says the past six-twelve months alone have seen dramatic progress in solving the engineering challenge of making a useful quantum computer, one that can ignore noise to correct errors. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be there in a few short years\u2026we\u2019re really not far off. All the stuff we\u2019re using right now is not safe.\u201d <\/p>\n Dr Erven says that whichever country gets the first such machine will probably keep it \u201csecret, in a basement\u201d for as long as possible. \u201cNo one is going to shout about the world\u2019s first large quantum computer.\u201d That\u2019s because they could use the digital skeleton key provided by a quantum computer to silently collect the world\u2019s most closely guarded secrets. What does the British state stand to lose? Cutting-edge defence research? The names and addresses of all our spies? Our war plans? The nuclear launch codes? We must assume, or hope, that if these secrets have not yet been protected with quantum proof-ciphers, they soon will be. Even so, it could be too late.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because of what the intelligence community calls \u201charvest now, decrypt later\u201d. Our enemies are stealing data, even when it\u2019s encrypted, waiting to unscramble it once they get a working quantum computer. No one doubts that China has been patiently accumulating data<\/a>, ready for the day it might become useful. This is another way in which we are already fighting a cyber-war. <\/p>\n Some secrets don\u2019t age. That\u2019s part of the reason we have the 30-year rule, which delays the release of sensitive official files. If an enemy state\u2019s quantum computer decrypts data stolen from the British government, they would still need to comb through millions of emails and documents. That could take humans months or years, but AIs \u2013 so-called large language models like ChatGPT 5 \u2013 could do it in hours. A Chinese or Russian LLM could extract and highlight everything that could hurt us most. Running the country, let alone fighting a war, would be impossible. The geopolitical balance would be instantly upended. <\/p>\n We could hit back. Dr Lucas Kello, director of the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University, told me that the UK has a formidable cyber offensive capability. Britain and the US were almost certainly \u201cpre-positioning\u201d malware in the infrastructure of potential enemies. The critical systems of all major powers were probably already mutually compromised \u2013 a condition he said could deter outright cyber-war. This is the cyber version of Mutually Assured Destruction.<\/p>\n \t\tYour next read<\/p>\n
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