HMS Queen Elizabeth potentially vulnerable to cyber-attack

Britain’s new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth could be vulnerable to a cyber-attack as it seems to be using the same system that left the NHS exposed.

Officers aboard the carrier, which has left the Rosyth dockyard, have however insisted that they will have a team of cyber specialists on board to defend against such attacks.

The same Windows XP operating system that has been spotted onboard during a tour of the carrier was targeted by the WannaCry ransomware attack in May that disrupted parts of the NHS and other organisations worldwide. Parliament also came under cyber-attack with the accounts of about 90 MPs hacked.

Mark Deller, commander air on the Queen Elizabeth, said: “The ship is well designed and there has been a very, very stringent procurement train that has ensured we are less susceptible to cyber than most. With regards to someone wanting to jam my radio frequencies, we will have an escort and destroyers around us that will ward off people who try and impact our output. That’s normal routine business at sea.

“We are a very sanitised procurement train. I would say compared to the NHS buying computers off the shelf, I would think we are probably better than that. If you think more Nasa and less NHS you are probably in the right place. If the Chinese want to flood the market with a particular widget and they put £30m into it, one will eventually get through to the defence procurement chain. We have got people looking at stuff like this all the time.

“When you buy a ship, you don’t buy it today, you bought it 20 years ago. So what we put on the shelf and in the spec is probably what was good then. The reality is, we are always designed with spare capacity, so we will always have the ability to modify and upgrade. So whatever you see in the pictures, I think you will probably find we will be upgrading to whatever we want to have in due course. It might have already happened but I can’t tell you.”