Britain's Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey at the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit in Singapore on June 3. Pre-emptive cyber strikes against perceived national security threats are a "civilised option" to neutralise potential attacks, Harvey said.
Pre-emptive cyber strikes against perceived
national security threats are a "civilised option" to neutralise
potential attacks, Britain's armed forces minister said Sunday.
Nick Harvey made the comment at the
Shangri-La Dialogue security summit in Singapore in relation to reports
that the US had launched cyber attacks to cripple Iran's nuclear
programme.
"I don't know about the specifics and I'm not going to comment on them," Harvey said at the two-day meeting ending Sunday.
"But what I would say is that if a government
has arrived at the conclusion that it needs, out of its sense of
national interest or national security, to deliver an effect against an
adversary... arguably this is quite a civilised option."
A Russian computer firm said last week it had
discovered a new computer virus with unprecedented destructive
potential that chiefly targets Iran and could be used as a cyberweapon
by the West and Israel.
Kaspersky Lab said its experts discovered the
virus -- known as Flame -- during an investigation prompted by the
International Telecommunication Union.
Iran appears to have been the main target of
the attack and the announcement came just a month after the Islamic
Republic said it halted the spread of a data-deleting virus targeting
computer servers in its oil sector.
The New York Times reported Friday that Obama
accelerated cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear programme using the Stuxnet
virus, and expanded the assault even after the virus accidentally made
its way onto the Internet in 2010.
Britain's stance was supported by Canadian
Defence Minister Peter Gordon MacKay, who likened a pre-emptive cyber
strike to an "insurance policy", warning of the need to be prepared.
Malaysian Defence Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said a cyber arms race was already under way.
He urged members of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to pool their resources to tackle
increasingly complex cyber attacks which could paralyse a country's IT
systems.
"What remains disturbing is that cyber
warfare need not to be waged by state-run organisations but could be
conducted by non-state entities or even individuals with intent to cause
disruptions to the affairs of the state," he added.
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