Hague warns against cyber attacks

Foreign Secretary William Hague has issued a blunt warning to countries like China and Russia to halt hostile cyber attacks on other states.

In his closing address to the two-day London cyberspace conference yesterday, Mr Hague said governments needed to realise that such online offensives were not in their interests.

His comments came after David Cameron told the conference that online attempts to steal state secrets were taking place on an “industrial scale”.

“State-sponsored attacks are not in the interests of any country long-term, and those governments that perpetrate them need to bring them under control,” Mr Hague said.

He later said he was not going to name the “guilty men” responsible for such attacks, which have in the past targeted the Foreign Office’s IT system.

But earlier this week, the former security minister Baroness Neville-Jones who is now the Prime Minister’s representative to business on cyber security, said Beijing and Moscow were “certainly” involved in that sort of activity.

“We are going about this in a diplomatic way,” Mr Hague said. “We have, and we will have I expect ever more so in the future on current trends, vigorous private discussions about these things, particularly as our ability to detect cyber attacks.

“It hasn’t been our approach in this conference to identify countries and try to name and shame them. Of course that may happen on other occasions.”

Mr Hague insisted there was “overwhelming support” among the 60 nations represented at the conference for the principle that the internet should remain open to the “free flow of ideas, information and expression”.