Telecommunications (Security) Bill (First sitting)

Sara Britcliffe Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 14th January 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Lovely. I am now in the hands of Members. I am very happy to give preference to Members who did not ask a question in the previous session. First out of the blocks is Sara Britcliffe.

[Sara Britcliffe (Hyndburn) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Chair. It is just a quick one. What are the most pressing threats facing public telecoms networks, and how does this Bill address them?

Howard Watson: I note that some of this was answered by my colleagues earlier. Threats to the network include physical access. We all saw earlier this year a lot of attacks on our physical infrastructure, which were highly regrettable. I mean by that the setting alight of some of our infrastructure. We also faced logical threats, such as malware implants, DDoS attacks and what are called advanced persistent threats, which is an actor embedding themself into parts of the environment, staying hidden for a while and potentially collecting credentials—think of the SolarWinds hack that is in the news at the moment.

We take all those threats extremely seriously at BT. For as long as we have operated, we have worked very closely with all aspects of Government, and in particular with the National Cyber Security Centre. We take a sort of defence in depth approach. We have a red team who are ethically hacking us, and we are part of the TBEST scheme.

We think that the UK has a good track record here, but we also welcome the strengthening of that in the Bill. We think that some of the specific items about protecting even more against potential insider threat, looking hard at the vendors we use in the supply chain and having specific rigour about that, and the reporting mechanisms and requirements in the Bill, specifically around telecoms security requirements, will enhance that for all operators in the UK.

Alex Towers: I do not have much to add to that, except to say that, as Howard says, lots of the attention in the debate in the run-up to this Bill has been focused on a small number of very specific, clearly high-risk vendors. It is right that we take steps to protect ourselves around them, but just as important in the Bill will be the telecoms security requirements that stretch well beyond those specific vendors into all manner of aspects in which operators run their networks. Putting those two things together will be important.

[The Chair]

Thank you. The running order is Dean Russell, Miriam Cates, Kevan Jones, Christian Matheson and Chi Onwurah.