We're losing the cyberwar

So even when intelligence agencies have a detailed dossier of cyber crime, it is frustratingly hard to do anything with it. It’s an unfair fight. Huge, bureaucratic Western military forces are pitted against nimble, ever-mutating and lawless hackers. We struggle to accuse; they have no difficulty in denying. Bureaucracies are good at centralising information, but bad at securing it – which is why Bradley Manning, a bored private in the American Army, was able to pass so many secrets to Wikileaks. No wonder Chinese hackers can find almost anything they like.

The Israelis do all this best. They have a programme called Talpiot, which recruits the very brightest graduates to work on military computer systems. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, was in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago, admiring how the Israeli government has managed to harness entrepreneurial talent – something that could, of course, be replicated in Britain. Amid all the cuts, the cyber security budget has grown, and we’re generally seen as being better than most Western countries at this. But that, alas, is not saying much.

GCHQ estimates that about 80 per cent of cyber attacks in Britain are due to failure to implement basic internet security. Solving this is difficult because companies tend not to like sharing secrets with each other – preferring competition to collaboration. Nor do companies like admitting, even to their own staff, that they have been hacked. (Understandably: Sony is now being sued by staff who say it didn’t take enough care in keeping their personal details from the hackers.)