The defense minister Ben Wallace said the administration now believes a North Korean hacking crew was engaged but ended short of suggesting the UK could carry out retaliatory attacks.
“This attack, we think quite firmly that this came from a foreign state,” Mr. Wallace said. Adding that the state needed was “North Korea”, he said: “We can be as sure as convincing. I obviously can’t go into the part of intellect, but it is widely believed in the region and across a number of nations that North Korea had taken this role.”
Asked what the UK could do in reply to the attack, the ambassador acknowledged that it would be “questioning” to arrest anyone when a “hostile state” was involved.
He called on the West to rather develop a “doctrine of deterrent” similar to that used to hinder the use of nuclear weapons. “We do have a counterattack capability,” he said. “But let’s learn we are an open liberal state with a large reliance on IT systems. We will surely have a different risk appetite. If you get into a tit for tat there has to be serious thought of the risk we would expose UK citizens too.”
Earlier an autonomous research concluded that the cyber attack which disabled parts of the NHS could have been stopped if “basic IT security” measures had been taken.
The head of the National Audit Office warned the health assistance and Department of Health to “get their act collectively” in the wake of the WannaCry crisis, or risk suffering a more complex and damaging future attack.
The NAO’s probe discovered that nearly 19,500 medical choices, including 139 possible cancer referrals, were supposed to have been canceled, with five clinics ought to divert ambulances away after being bolted out of machines on May 12.
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