Cyber insecurity

The NatWest banking disaster is an ominous reminder of the way in which technology has come to control our lives. We now know what a proper IT collapse feels like: a piece of computer code goes wrong and, within days, bank machines shut down and chaos ensues. This week the stories range from unpaid bills to the parents of a critically ill seven-year-old in hospital in Mexico fearing that her life-support machine would be turned off for want of funds. NatWest says it was a software screw-up, not a cyber-attack. But there are plenty of the latter taking place every day.

As we show in our special cybersecurity supplement this week, Britain’s dependence on computers has become one of our biggest vulnerabilities. Already, major companies suffer cyber-attacks, usually attributed to China. Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, used a rare public speech this week to warn of ‘industrial-scale processes, involving many thousands of people, lying behind both state-sponsored cyber-espionage and organised cybercrime’.