UK ISPs lack interest in EU cyber attack, says Lords

UK telcos silent on EU cyber attack

The House of Lords has criticised UK ISPs for showing little interest in submitting evidence on UK cyber security.

The House of Lords EU Committee's fifth report, Protecting Europe against large-scale cyber-attacks, concluded that the UK is " reasonably well placed to cope with such disruptions."

But it said it regrets that key UK infrastructure players "should not have shown more interest in submitting evidence to this inquiry."

The UK's big carriers, BT, Cable & Wireless, and Virgin Media, and also lower-tier ISPs were absent from presenting any evidence in the oral and written submissions to the committee.

One of the report's functions was to look at "the part which the EU can play in helping the United Kingdom and other Member States to prevent and detect cyber attacks."

One proposal was to create national government-run Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) to address the threat of a cyber attack. But the committee concluded that existing measures are sufficient and that a national team is not needed.

The Lords report said: "none of our witnesses have suggested that the United Kingdom's current system of sector and company-specific CERTs should be replaced by a national United Kingdom CERT."

The Lords report pointed to the presence of three government CERTs set up to deal with internet incidents in the UK.

Currently there are two based in the GCHQ, one is GovCertUK, the government CERT for the public sector system, and the other is the recently established Cyber Security Operations Centre, responsible for defence against cyber attacks.

The third is the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, which provides protective security advice to businesses and organisations.

The US has a national CERT which interacts with federal agencies, industry, the research community, state and local governments, and others to disseminate reasoned and actionable cyber security information to the public.