Oral Answers to Questions

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

The right hon. Gentleman asks a valid question. Of course, our ambition is to continue in the same way, with access to and from member states. We have made a good offer, and we will see what the European Commission’s offer in response is.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

Last week, the chief executive officer of the National Cyber Security Centre said that, in its first year of operation, the centre had responded to over 600 significant incidents. Some of those threats come from hostile states and from areas of the world that are ungoverned. What practical steps are the Government going to take to build the international coalition that will be required to deal with this issue?

[Mr Wallace]

The hon. Gentleman raises some really valid questions and points, which we have to build on. That is why, alongside the national cyber-security strategy, we have been working with the National Crime Agency and its international network—we have NCA officers all the way round the world. Embedded in that is the National Cyber Crime Unit. GCHQ, as an intelligence agency, works with many of the member states of the European Union and the “Five Eyes” to tackle this issue. We have seen a number of very successful operations, most recently in December, when, in an operation led by Europol, we took down the Avalanche cloud hosting service that was sending over 1 million fraudulent emails a week.