This is what he said
Sir Michael Fallon the defence secretary has refused to deny that the UK’s nuclear submarines are using the outdated Windows XP programme.
Friday there was a worldwide cyber-attack and Europol has said Sunday that more than 200,000 people are affected in 150 countries.
The Russian government was also hit by Friday’s worldwide attack, along with thousands of businesses and large corporations including the NHS.
Fallon has insisted that Britain’s nuclear deterrent is protected from cyberattacks and the submarines are “safe” as they operate in “isolation” and has dismissed concerns over any virus threat to Trident.
Fallon said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “We never comment on the different systems, obviously for reasons of security, that our submarines use.”
“But our Vanguard submarines I can absolutely assure you, are safe and operate in isolation when they are out on patrol.”
This possibly suggests that submarines are not connected to the internet therefore, they will be unaffected.
He continued: “I have complete confidence in our nuclear deterrent.”
“I can assure you the nuclear deterrent is full protected.”
Fallon said the government had set aside £1.9bn to tackle cyber-attacks.
Speaking about the NHS cyberattack, Sam Hutton the CTO at Glasswall Solutions said to LondonLovesBusiness.com on Saturday: “This is a major cyber-attack on the NHS in which criminals are potentially putting the wellbeing of an entire country at risk by locking up data and demanding a ransom.”
“It is likely to have been started in the same way that more than 90 per cent of these attacks start by tricking employees to open email attachments that contain hidden code. Anti-virus defences are useless against these attacks because they only search for known threats, not the new threats and zero-day attacks being devised by criminals on a daily basis.”
“Everyone at the top level should have woken up to this by now because these attacks in email attachments have been going on for a long time. Yet still the senior people stick with the old anti-virus technology that simply doesn’t work and in the process, they’re putting organisations like the NHS at risk.”
“It seems inconceivable that organisations such as the NHS are prepared to jeopardise highly confidential patient data or critical infrastructure through inadequate cyber security that relies heavily on out-dated anti-virus technologies, when effective alternatives like file-regeneration are available.”
In a tweet posted on Friday, this is what they had to say:
“Sickening reality is traditional anti-virus cannot protect companies from #cyberattacks,” says our CEO Greg Sim – https://t.co/1mCU8sDIUh
— Glasswall Solutions (@glasswallnews) May 12, 2017
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