US and England experiment with attacks on vulnerable systems

The United States and the United Kingdom will simulate hacker attacks to test important systems for vulnerabilities. The friendly countries are keeping an eye on each other’s systems, they announced on Friday.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron announced the partnership on Friday during Cameron’s two-day state visit to the United States. In it, the two heads of government expressed their concerns about the major cyber attacks that had recently occurred, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The British government announced that the two countries will test each other’s online infrastructure with a series of experiments. The first will take place at the end of this year and is intended to simulate an attack on the systems of the financial sector. Other experiments focus on other potentially vulnerable systems, such as those of the energy and transport sector.

The United States and the United Kingdom are, among other things, concerned about the impact that, for example, the hack at Sony Pictures recently had. In doing so, hackers stole company data and unreleased films, among other things. The FBI claims to know that the Sony Pictures hackers are from North Korea, although that claim has been criticized.

The countries have now agreed to intensify their cooperation to share information about cyber threats. In addition, they try to respond more appropriately to attacks. In particular, the intelligence services of both countries are involved. The United States and the United Kingdom also say they will put extra money into training so-called cyber agents. With this they want to be ahead of the attackers, according to Cameron.