Ministry of Defence hacking
Presumably the part time Minister of Defence, Des "Swiss Tony" Browne was not around to sign this Parliamentary Written Answer himself, so it fell to the unfortunate Bob Ainsworth instead.
3 Dec 2007 : Column 839W[...]
HackingDr. Fox: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many instances of cyber-attacks on his Department’s (a) public internet website, (b) non-classified intranet, (c) classified intranet, (d) non-classified e-mail system and (e) classified e-mail
3 Dec 2007 : Column 840W
system were reported in each month since 2005; and what the circumstances were of each incident. [169461]
Mr. Bob Ainsworth: It would not be in the interests of the UK’s national security for MOD to confirm whether it holds information about attacks against its IT systems as this would enable individuals to deduce how successful the Department is in detecting these attacks.
This illogical reply implies that somehow all of the Ministry of Defence's enemies are magically acting in concert and sharing their reconnaissance probe and attack data with each other.
Even if this unlikely scenario were somehow true, then how could the revelation of 5 numerical figures, as asked for in this poorly worded Question, conceivably tell any attackers something they do not already know ? Such figures are not related to individual computers, which may or may not have been attacked successfully in a particular month, each of the 5 categories represents multiple systems - some of them tens of thousands of systems.
Is this a sign of a bunker mentality at the MoD, or just more contempt for transparency and open government ?
Does this policy mean that no foreign or UK hackers will ever be brought to trial for attacking Ministry of Defence systems, in case this reveals how weak those systems are ?