UK “has cyber attack capability”

Last week in England Lord West (Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Security and Counter-terrorism) indicated that the UK has the ability to launch cyber-attacks. Though his interview was very thin on facts and details, he made some interesting comments that GCHQ (The British Government’s communications and information systems arm in Cheltenham, UK) have former “naughty boys” in its employ, and that:
“It would be silly to say that we don’t have any capability to do offensive work from Cheltenham, and I don’t think I should say any more than that”
Interesting indeed, but I’d liked him to at least tell me something about what the government could do that the average hacker could not. Do they have more resources than the average bot net for example?
The whole concept of Cyber Attack, when sponsored by a state entity against another nation is a little grey at the moment – Dr Neil Rowe has written a series of interesting papers on the subject, notably the concept of “War Crimes from Cyberweapons“, where he raises the idea that as cyber attacks typically affect the civilian populations more than military (as they are the soft target), and as the international laws of the conduct of War (The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the Geneva (continue reading...)